On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:48 PM, Angela Anuszewski < angela.anuszewski(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Nope, Wikipedia should never be used as a citation. -- Alex (User:Majorly)

On Oct 28, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Al Tally wrote: 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

Without it, I probably would have figured out they meant the actual episode of the TV show. Thanks for clearing up what I was seeing. As for the other issue, wouldn't a wikilink be better than a cite if another article provides a great deal more information on a topic? It seems cleaner to me. Angela

AFAIK, citing other Wikipedia articles in the form of episodes of a show is actually quite common for TV show articles; for example, in articles for Scrubs, a TV show popular in the States, character articles often sources statements made by that character as simply <ref>[[Episode name]], season 2, episode 17</ref>, or something similar. I don't really see this as a negative thing, though; and certainly better than no citation at all.

----- Original Message ----- From: Alex Sawczynec &lt;glasscobra15(a)gmail.com&gt; In fact, in the vast majority of such cases the citation isn't actually intended to cite the article it's linked to, it's citing the episode _itself_ (as a primary source). The link to the Wikipedia article is merely included as a convenience, since you generally can't link directly to a television episode.

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 11:10 PM, David Goodman &lt;dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I agree with Dr. Goodman. I have, in the past, referenced articles by just linking to the article on the book I've been using & adding a page number. information in each place it is needed is complete and utter FAIL. I am hard-pressed to think of an even more massive violation of good practices like the DRY Principle*. Why should I have <ref></ref>s which are 20 lines of {{cite book}} gunk, when I could just do <ref>[[Seeds in the Heart]], pg 172</ref>? I just don't see it. It introduces no more risks than the current system, and makes it easier for out of date bibliographic information to remain and be propagated. * https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself -- gwern

Thanks, i try not to, sometimes it is is unavoidable. If you are referring to the Hermitage, I will never do that because their site though useful is full of inacuracies and distortions, which are not repeated in my new pages. G On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Bryan Derksen &lt;bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca&gt;wrote;wrote:

Is there any preferred way to reference information like television shows/episodes because i know some people considered using hulu and adding a timepoint but the downside is that it's restricted to US viewers only, so thats why i'm kinda in favor of referencing Wikipedia content for somethings like this. -Peachey

I had asked a similar question a few months ago, but I was writing an article. I was told I shouldn't add a citation to an article, but policies change. On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:48 PM, Angela Anuszewski < angela.anuszewski(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

2008/11/3 K. Peachey &lt;p858snake(a)yahoo.com.au&gt;au>: It's not really an exception - you aren't citing the Wikipedia article, you are citing the episode and just giving a convenient link to the article. Actually citing a Wikipedia article is never permitted (at least, doing so explicitly isn't, you could say that summary style articles cite the "main article").