On Oct 28, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Al Tally wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:48 PM, Angela Anuszewski < angela.anuszewski@gmail.com> wrote:
I just encountered, on the article [[House (TV series)]], that citation #3 is actually just a link to [[Words and Deeds (House)]]. Can a article really cite another article or should that citation be removed? Seems a little squirrely to me.
Angela
Nope, Wikipedia should never be used as a citation.
I think this position is unhelpfully hardline - in the case of fiction articles at least, a citation to another article seems fine in some cases so long as that article is well-referenced. I'm thinking here of situations where an article on a TV series makes a glancing reference to a plot point that is dealt with at length in an episode specific article. We could use the primary source citation in the series article, but it's arguably more helpful to point first to our article on the episode, and then from there cite the episode itself. For information that is a distillation of multiple sources, when we have an article that takes a broader view, citing a statement to that article, so long as the article cites its sources well, does seem to me a potentially valid move - but we should understand that what we're really doing there is not citing our article, but rather saying "There's actually a lot of referencing going into this statement, and you should have a broad look at it."
That said, that doesn't seem to be what happened in this case anyway - it looks to me like the citation was to the episode itself, with a convenience link to the article, and that someone subsequently misread that citation as a citation to the article and added a "Retrieved on" tag.
-Phil