Where Good Citations come From

Call me old-fashioned, but I never thought that truth was simply generated by whoever is in power. (This would require that those in power had a perfect ability to not only control everybody, but also to predict what fabricated truths would be in their interest for all eternity – well, no, nobody really knows that.)

Here is another way in which things can become considered to be true: the always observant XKCD shows how the citation policies of Wikipedia (always refer to external source) quickly go wrong when Wikipedia is used for writing those external sources in the first place:

2 thoughts on “Where Good Citations come From”

  1. So it’s not so surprising that I recently realised that a reference from the article “Fabula and syuzhet” in Wikipedia to a book by Boje is totally fake. The book doesn’t even mention these words (fabula or syuzhet) in the whole text. Luckily I checked the book before quoting!

  2. I’ve become amazed at how poor some citations in publications are. A month or so ago I spent a whole day trying to track down a quote someone cited only to find that someone had cited someone’s summary of an article as if it were an actual quote. And the summary wasn’t even very accurate to start with.

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