User:SummerPhD/House of cards

Wiki pages cannot be used as sources on Wikipedia
Some editors will, when pressed for a source, cite a wikipedia page, a wiki-like project on another site or a website that is based on Wikipedia. This is not a good idea. Heck, I'll go so far as to say it's a bad idea.

Wikipedia as a source for Wikipedia
Three fictitious pages: John Nonesuch, Hornswaggling , List of notable hornswagglers , a couple of possible scenarios: John Nonesuch says:
 * John Nonesuch was named the "world's greatest hornswaggler by Hornswaggler Monthly.1


 * 1. ^ List of notable hornswagglers

List of notable hornswagglers dutifully lists:
 * John Nonesuch - Considered the world's greatest hornswaggler by Hornswaggler Monthly.2


 * 2. ^ Hornswaggling

Hornswaggling, of course, tells us:
 * Hornswaggler Monthly named John Nonesuch the "world's greatest hornswaggler".3


 * 3. ^ John Nonesuch

As someone once said, "There's no 'there' there."

A second possibility:

Hornswaggling tells us:
 * Hornswaggler Monthly named John Nonesuch the "world's greatest hornswaggler".3


 * 3. ^ John Nonesuch]]

In John Nonesuch, though, we find no such reference. It was there once, but another editor removed it after finding that the reference was made up or misquoted. Heck, the John Nonesuch]] article may have been deleted when it turned out he was just someone's favorite gym teacher who showed them hornswaggling one day.

Wiki-like projects as sources for wikipedia
Your average internet fan site will take pretty much any information you throw at them, if it makes their dreamy subject look good. Sources and accuracy aren't that important. These are bad enough, but generally easy to spot. References to "JohnNonesuchworshipPage.geocities.com" should be disposed of without a second thought.

A bit more complicated are the sites with some credibility. The Internet Movie Database, imdb.com, has been around for a while (as websites go, that is). It's pretty reliable for listing credit information on movies: who was in what. It get's that information from rock solid sources and is reliable for that. Everything else on the site is a wiki. Want to add your favorite quote from a movie, even if you can't quite remember the wording? No problem. Want to assign random keywords to a film? They've got you covered. Feel the need to fabricate some trivia about some starlet? They'll generally let it slide. So, if you need to create, for instance, outside references to "Nonstatutory female on male rape", you can assign those keywords to your selected movies and post the results as a "source" on wikipedia. Isn't the internet great?!

Other projects, like the Muppet Wiki or Memory Alpha are really just specialized versions of Wikipedia, making them no more reliable (in general) than your average wikipedia page.

Websites based on Wikipedia as sources for Wikipedia
This one can get tricky. Some websites are merely mirrors of Wikipedia, and clearly state it somewhere on the page... Others copy from Wikipedia or from sites that copy from Wikipedia without mentioning it. The first ones are fairly easy to spot.

Pages that copy directly or indirectly from us without cites can sometimes be figured out by the language they use or odd juxtipositions. If a website is talking about "John Nonesuch" and says something like "John William Nonesuch is a Swedish Hornswaggler..." you might suspect it's been copied.

Heck, the page might even have a paragraph about something Nonesuch just did, then go into that same paragraph. You might even see dead links to Wikipedia sources or other Wikipedia articles. It makes the drudgery of writing a blog for the masses a bit easier, I guess.

Other sites might simply use Wikipedia to do the work they don't want to while taking the credit. These are harder to catch. After all, what Wikipedia finds notable about Nonesuch is of fairly general interest, right? So Joe Webmaster takes our article, rewrites it and puts it up. Citing that site is a mistake.

The best way to prevent those kinds of mistakes is to cite only reliable sources, not just the first thing that Google spits out.