Referencing and Sources (Part One)
29 07 2006
Like many folk I use Wikipedia quite a lot and think it’s a wonderful resource for finding out a reasonable amount about a particular subject. Clearly is falls short of having a primary or original sources of information or, for that matter, a second hand source.
A good new feature in Wikipedia is that pages come with a cite this link.
This gives you the information you need, all formatted correctly, if you want to refer to something when you are writing. There are different styles of doing this but they all boil down to saying where you are getting your information from with enough detail that someone else could check it.
For example if I was using some information about working dogs from the Wikipedia artile I could use the Harvard style of citation which would look like this in my bibliography.
See Wikipedia, Working dog, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_dog (as of Jul. 29, 2006, 03:16 GMT).
