[WikiEN-l] NY Times: Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book

[Joseph Reagle]

On Thursday 25 June 2009, Charles Matthews wrote:
> My comment was written late at night. But I don't really understand why 
> the author thought (a) permalinks are uncool, but (b) paraphrasing this 
> WP stuff and passing it off as my own and copyright is clearly cool. And 
> issues this as an apology.

I agree, permalinks are the way to go. However, I can sympathize with the ugliness of permalinks and access requirements, which are standard Chicago. If you have more than one Web resource referenced in a note (if you don't want every sentence to have a footnote), it's really difficult to read:

[[
53. Wikipedia, “Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View,” Wikimedia, September 16, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view & oldid = 6042007 (accessed March 5, 2004); Wikipedia, “Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View,” Wikimedia, November 3, 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view&oldid=249390830 (accessed November 3, 2008).
...
63. Wikipedia, “Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (oldid=249390830).”
]] 

In the context of the two Chicago notes variants, I've made the following experiment in my manuscript:

1. Long (end) notes upon first instance (including URL) and subsequent short notes (with version number noted in title of Wikipedia pages, such as in note 63 above) subsequently yields 396 pages.
2. Short (end) notes (such as note 63 above) followed by bibliography with full citation (including URL) yields 452 pages.

Option 2 is more readable, but requires a redirection by the reader if they want full bibliographic detail, and adds pages (and weight and cost) to a book. Another option is to use an adaptation of Option 1: standard long-then-short Chicago without URLs, which are provided online. This make a practical sort of sense (and this is what Anderson *says* he was planning to do), but is non-standard and I'm not sure how it would be received.

*However*, this difficulty doesn't mean that one should simply "write through" one's sources (whatever that means) and remove the attribution all together.



This thread also inspired a blog post:
  http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/anderson-and-citing-wikipedia