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 | This page in a nutshell: In determining English usage, Wikipedia relies on attestation in reliable secondary sources |
In linguistics, attestation means the occurrence of a word, phrase, morpheme or other linguistic element in a corpus.
Or in laymen's terms, it means you've found the thing in something someone unprompted said or wrote. And this is evidence that it's real-world language.
This is important to English Wikipedians because of our policy to use English, which means we use it as we find it attested in reliable secondary sources. Which sounds and should be simple, but there are some stumbling blocks.
Concise terms
editContent vs style
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