In an entry below I offer that the citation of a Wikipedia reference is not reliable, and I can't take responsibility if someone changes the entry between my link and your click. I am not totally kidding, I "Wikipediaed" a semi-famous individual recently and the entry described him as a serial rapist. In broken English. Someone was obviously bored, or had a bad experience with this small time celeb. I quickly reedited it, but it sure brought home to me the problem with Wikipedia. But then I thought: could you, as a blogger, just reedit or write your own Wikipedia entries and then link to them as a citation? Anyway, I guess you could say I'm pretty cautious about linking to Wikipedia in regards to things that I'm not totally sure about, or that are not copiously cited. A lot of the technical stuff is good, and Wikipedia is actually often well referenced on many entries, so it is a good starting point, but it sure isn't The Answer (and remember, Iverson's field goal % isn't that high). There are similar problems with google. For example, a) You have hypothesis/assertion A b) Someone calls you on it c) You proceed to use google (and google scholar) to find 10 citations which back you up d) But there is a problem, the set of all studies relating to hypothesis/assertion A is enormous, it is very easy to simply return back an unrepresentative sample of studies which do support your particular hypothesis via a query e) So, two things, the citations need to be unbiased and representative of the totality of the scholarship. And second, you need to actually know something about the field or the topic so you can use google intelligently. Most people who I have had this issue with are offering up an unrepresentative sample without knowing because they don't know the shape of the distribution a priori. Update: From the comments:
A citation or link to Wikipedia should be in citation format -- which means its unchangeable. For instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Oak takes you to the ever changing (or not) description of Faulkner's home. Conversely, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rowan_Oak&oldid=71987882 takes you to a time/date frozen version which will never change. To get the citation link, click on the "cite this article" link under the search box when viewing the main article.
