Formalize Citations

Since adding the plagiarism section to the contributing doc, we now have our first set of citations (See Brainfuck). How do we want to formalize these citations? Are the current citations fine?

I was looking into this and dug up the IEEE standard:

<author(s) names> (<date>) <title of program/source code> (<code version>) [<type>]. Web address or publisher.

which might look like the following according to University of Arkansas:

Smith, J (2011) GraphicsDrawer source code (Version 2.0) [Source code]. http://www.graphicsdrawer.com

If we adopt this style, I’d also like to include a link to the snippet by line number(s) at the front of the solution like:

<source link>: <author(s) names> (<date>) <title of program/source code> (<code version>) [<type>]. Web address or publisher.

Alternatively, we can keep the more descriptive citations that we have now. In fact, I think I like those better because we can be clear in how and why we chose to borrow some code. In addition, we can state whether or not the code was copied verbatim, or if the solution was adapted from the cited code.

That said, we should probably agree on some sort of standard citation. Any ideas?

[chrboe]

Just my 2¢ on this, I think more informal citations are fine (though I’m probably biased since I’m the one who started doing it that way in the first place). Formal citations would be nice too, though I think finding out the exact author name every time could get difficult in some cases.

I think it’s probably enough to just include the source (e.g. URL) and a brief note on why the snippet was stolen/repurposed. I think a note like this could be helpful for future editors of the snippet (i.e. removing unused citations and better understanding what existing citations are about).

That said, I do agree about the link rot situation. web.archive.org is probably a fine solution in 99% of all cases, and I’m sure we can think of something else if a site happens to be unavailable on the archive.

[jrg94]

Apparently, web.archive.org allows you to take live snapshots of websites, so you can archive them right as you access them. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will work for web apps like the text generator you used, but I could be wrong.