On Oct 28, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Al Tally wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:48 PM, Angela Anuszewski
<
angela.anuszewski(a)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