Link to your sources! 23 May 2008
Posted by volcanism in blogs, miscellaneous.Tags: blogging, blogs
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There’s a very good post at the BlogCatalog Community Blog by historian Mark Stoneman: ‘Do you link to your sources?’
Here at The Volcanism Blog I try to provide links to the original sources for everything – you, the reader, have the right to ask ‘how does he know that?’ when you read my stuff, and it’s my job to tell you, by providing access to the original source material.
Mark Stoneman provides four excellent reasons to provide sources if you want your blogging to be taken seriously: verifiability, acknowledgement, examples, context. I would add another: further exploration of a topic. A good blog post should open the door to further exploration of its subject matter by providing links to reliable, authoritative sources* that the reader can follow up, should they so wish. Not only do sources show your readers how you came up with your argument, they also provide the raw materials for those readers to engage fully with the topic and come up with arguments of their own. A blog post that is an unsourced and linkless is a dead end in more ways than one.
* Hence no links to Wikipedia on this blog.
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Exploration. Definitely!
No Wikipedia? Uh oh. I’d have a problem without Wikipedia. But it depends on what a person is blogging on. I could see it not working here at all. I use it sparingly. Yesterday, for instance, on my personal blog, I linked to slam poetry. I had tried to find something more definitive, but I gave up when that was all even the Poetry Foundation was linking too. I sometimes link place names to it too, or other very general stuff when I’m less worried about the dumb things that can occur on that site. And I definitely do not use it for verifiability.
Anyway, thanks for mentioning my guest blog piece on the BlogCatalog blog.
Side note: Have you thought about turning off the snaps here? I’m not a regular reader, so I don’t count, but I find the things obscure my view at unexpected moments. I don’t like the way that company is trying to change the behavior of hyperlinks.
I love the way you’ve modified this template. So many I’ve seen just ruin the original, but this creates something completely new and visually appealing.
Oh, since this is a scientific blog and I just saw your note about web sources moving, you might want to have a look at WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org.
Mark, thanks for the comment. Those irritating snaps have been killed off – should have done that ages ago.
Wikipedia has its uses, but should never be used other than recreationally in my opinion (or as a place to go for links to proper sources). Or if there is absolutely nothing else, I suppose: and for almost everything worthwhile – no disrespect to slam poetry – there will be, surely, something else. It baffles me when someone writing a blog piece on a particular volcano, for example, links to the Wikipedia article about it when the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program is available.
Thanks for the kind words on the template – my secret is simply to leave it alone as far as possible. And thanks for the webcitation reference, which I will follow up.