[WikiEN-l] Re: Citations

Sun Jan 25 00:11:15 UTC 2004

> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
>> I agree completely. Lack of citation and traceability is IMHO a big
>> glaring
>> deficiency in traditional encyclopedias, and it's one that should be
>> remediable
>> in a hypertext encyclopedia. tter Wiki-apparatus for the purpose).
>
> But this seems to assume that the citations will all be to websites,
> which isn't likely to be the case--most respected, reliable information
> is still not available online.  So citations of that sort will have to
> be to books or journal articles, which in many cases won't be 
> accessible
> through hypertext.

What I meant was that I don't understand why
citations--to books, websites, "personal
communications," what have you--aren't used more often.
I don't personally care so much what the format is, so long
as they're _there_. By "hypertext," I just meant that it
provides possibilities for presenting the text in a way
that doesn't interrupt flow for the casual reader, while
still allowing the references to be visible to the reader
who wants to see the citations.

The way it was done in "Seabiscuit," and which
is becoming very popular for nonscholarly nonfiction,
is a technique for which I don't know a name, which I
will call "invisible endnotes." That is, there are no markers
in the text at all, but at the end of the book the citations
are referenced by chapter number, page number, and
starting phrase of the sentence. This seems to me to
be close to ideal--but it wouldn't work very well in
Wikipedia, at least not without some technical apparatus
that isn't in place yet, because Wikipedia articles don't
have numbered pages and are subject to constant
editing.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate: 
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
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