Tag Archives: Citation

A Citation is Forever

“Miscellaneous fancy work.” From the Project G...
“Miscellaneous fancy work.” From the Project Gutenberg eBook of Encyclopedia of Needlework. (Photo credit: SWANclothing)

Last week, I talked about the basic model I'm considering for managing static web content in a way that lets us find it based on when we looked at it. The idea is that if I want to cite something, I should be able to point at what I'm citing and know that someone else following my citations will see the same thing I did.

Today, I want to explore what it means for something to be citable.

I come from the sciences, where citation is a shorthand for bringing in a body of work that you don't want to reproduce in your text. It's like linking in a library in a program. You're asserting that something is important to your argument and anyone can find out why they should believe it by following the citation. You don't have to explain the reasoning behind what you're referencing.

If you use citations to give shout outs to people in your field, then you don't need what I'm thinking about. Readers understand that these citations are to remind them about the other people and their body of work, not the particular passage pointed to in the citation. The details aren't important enough to look up.

I'm interested in the citations that people need to follow.

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