[texhax] how to cite a wikipedia page

[Schwartz, Steven J]

Ron

On 1 Mar 2013, at 02:46, "Ron RJF Fehd" <ron.fehd.macro.maven at gmail.com<mailto:ron.fehd.macro.maven at gmail.com>> wrote:


I am writing an article for my SAS user group conference.
and am wondering about Convention Wisdom
for citations of <http://wikipedia.org> wikipedia.org<http://wikipedia.org> pages.

Are any other authors citing <http://wikipedia.org> wikipedia.org<http://wikipedia.org> as a reference?

If so,
1. which?

i.e.: as an article, book, collection, journal, proceedings, etc?

2. author for wikipedia entry?

I'm sure there are better LaTeXie answers, but from a pragmatic point of view what matters is the information that gets inserted in your bibliography - and it's formatting. This has as much to do with your bibliography style (bst) as it does with the classification as article, book etc. So I would compose by hand what I wanted the citation/reference to look like and then get latex to match it. This solution of course is not robust against application to a different bst but it reinforces the point of the exercise, namely to generate a document that is appropriately referenced.

It is good practise, btw, when citing web pages, to include in the bibliography the date the page was accessed, as the reader may be in for a shock when they follow the URL and find something different. In the case of wikipedia, the user may even be able to troll through the document history to see when it was changed, why, and by whom.

I also think that the author field should be "Wikipedia" or somesuch, alphabetised undress W.

Best wishes
Steve




-----------
Steve Schwartz
Space and Atmospheric Physics
Imperial College London
Tel 020 7594 7660

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