----- WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
From: WJhonson@aol.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, 12 August, 2008 6:41:10 AM GMT +10:00 Brisbane Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The dangers of not citing Wikipedia
Interesting.
As to the point about secondary citation, it is standard practice in classes that teach about research and writing to cover how to do secondary citation. For example look at _http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/apadocu.html_ (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/apadocu.html)
The way we should approach citing a reference *through* someone else's
citation is "so and so as cited in such and such"
It's really a matter of courtesy that we cite *in some way* the actual
source which we actually consulted. Of course that isn't the issue here. It would appear, reading-between-the-lines, that exact quotes or paraphrases were lifted from the Wikipedia article without either en-quoting, or acknowledging the source whatsoever. Or perhaps merely acknowledging it by way of a simple bibliography, which really isn't sufficient if you are quoting.
Will Johnson
Good point. I do the "as cited by" thing for published papers, but for wikipedia with its mix of anonymous, and pseudonymous users, and its continual evolution, it just doesn't look right to say "as cited by Wikipedia user 204.23.144.2 at 13:00 UTC on August 12, 2008" (if you even feel like taking the time to figure out which user it was that actually put the citation in given how many revisions are on many articles).
Cheers,
Peter