Editing User:Aaronshaw/Better Wikipedia citations

From CommunityData

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then publish the changes below to finish undoing the edit.

Latest revision Your text
Line 44: Line 44:
== Are there more advanced solutions? ==
== Are there more advanced solutions? ==


I called this a "basic solution", so are there others? You bet. These get more involved because they entail using another site or tool to create an archival copy of the version of the page corresponding to the revision you want to cite. One example of such a tool is [https://perma.cc perma.cc], which is what my collaborators and I use when we're citing URLs in our published work. Perma.cc is a subscription-based service that we get access to through our universities, so if that's not an option, you might also use something like the [https://web.archive.org/ Internet Archive's Wayback Machine], where there's a little text-field where you can enter a URL to "Save page now." The Internet Archive also has browser extensions linked from their homepage if you prefer that kind of thing (I can't vouch because haven't used them myself). For most people most of the time, I suspect that these even-more-permanent archival links are not necessary. That said, at least you know about them now in case they ever become something you're looking to use!
I called this a "basic solution", so are there others? You bet. These get more involved because they basically entail using another site or tool to create and archive the version of the page corresponding to the revision you want to cite. One example of such a tool is [https://perma.cc perma.cc], which is what my collaborators and I use when we're citing URLs in our published work. You might also use something like the [https://archive.org Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] if they have a version of the page that suits your needs. For most people most of the time, I suspect that these even-more-permanent archival links are not necessary. That said, at least you know about them now in case they ever become something you're looking to use.


== Wait, does this mean I can cite Wikipedia for ''anything'' now? ==
== Wait, does this mean I can cite Wikipedia for ''anything'' now? ==


Well, hold on there, cowboy. Wikipedia is, like any other information source, only as good as the evidence behind it. In that regard, nothing about my recommendations here make any of the information on Wikipedia any more reliable than it was before. You have to use other skills and resources to assess the quality of the information you're citing on Wikipedia (e.g., the content/quality of the references used to support the claims made in any given article). Like I said above, the problem this really tries to solve is more about how to best cite something on Wikipedia, given that you have some good reason to want to cite it in the first place.
Well, hold on there, cowboy. Wikipedia is, like any other information source, only as good as the evidence behind it. In that regard, nothing about my recommendations here make any of the information on Wikipedia any more reliable than it was before. You have to use other skills and resources to assess the quality of the information you're citing on Wikipedia (e.g., the content/quality of the references used to support the claims made in any given article). Like I said above, the problem this really tries to solve is more about how to best cite something on Wikipedia, given that you have some good reason to want to cite it in the first place.
Please note that all contributions to CommunityData are considered to be released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (see CommunityData:Copyrights for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel Editing help (opens in new window)