MYSTlore:Citations
From MYSTlore
A lot of factoids surrounding MYSTlore's scope are very difficult and obscure to track down. Often, little tidbits are thrown out or validated unexpectedly in such ventures as forum posts (e.g., from Cyan employees).
In an effort to separate facts, speculation and misconceptions from each other, citations can prove very helpful. Towards this direction, the following can be done:
- Whenever you find an assertion dubious or are merely curious about its source, you can encourage other contributors to try and back it up. By appending a{{cite}}template to such a statement (e.g., a sentence or complete section), others might be able to help out and insert a suitable piece of evidence to partially or completely validate the assertion.
- If you have partial information (or a possible clue), it is in most cases best to use the talk page to mention discuss it. Others can then evaluate its accuracy.
- In case of definite evidence, use<ref>and{{references}}to provide it. This will use footnotes, rather than cluttering up the main part of the article. Begin your reference in<ref>, and end it with</ref>. Then, towards the end of the article, put{{references}}, which will add a new section filled with your footnotes and styled appropriately. An example article that uses this technique is Ti'ana; view its Wiki source by editing the page to find out how it's been used.
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[edit] Citation vs. Verification
Citation and verification are two related concepts: in either case, an editor requests further evidence that an assertion is accurate. The two differ in importance only: whereas the {{verify}} template is used to ask fellow editors to confirm that they have heard the same account of information, the {{cite}} is a plea for concrete proof, i.e. a quote or a hyperlink. A citation is often much harder (and perhaps completely impossible) to obtain; a verification, instead, is generally straightforward.
[edit] Validity of citations
When quoting statements from other parts of the Internet, the authority can vary. For example, a statement from a Cyan employee is generally a lot more likely to be correct than one from a fan. That said, even the latter would be better than nothing at all. In the worst case, that person could still be contacted and asked where they have the information from, which in turn could lead to more authoritative sources.
Please note: MYSTlore is not, and never will be, an official, authoritative, infallible or complete source of information about the Myst Universe. For the most part, the only true such resource would be Cyan, and even they have been known to make mistakes or otherwise revision previous statements.
[edit] Problems with external hyperlinks (World Wide Web references)
[edit] Unavailability
Often, websites cease to be run, or have changed its URL to an unknown different one. Consequently, URLs may expire; this is known as linkrot[1].
One solution is for third-parties to cache or archive the pages while they are still available. Among the various such efforts are:
- websites using Heritrix, which is most notable for its snapshots, i.e. different versions of the same URL at different times, used by:
- Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, trying to archive the World Wide Web as thoroughly as possible
- hanzo:web social web archiving, which is on-demand: it requires people to specifically request crawling of a page (but can be set up to repeat crawling regularly)
- web search crawlers, which usually only focus on particular URLs and tend to have incomplete copies:
Such attempts are not particularly thorough or otherwise reliable. It is advisable that you try and archive important webpages on your own, to prepare for such cases. You can get a free account at hanzo:web to request archiving for websites as you come across them and find them relevant and/or are afraid they may disappear soon.
[edit] Accounts
Some access to websites requires registration of a user account, which may or may not be free. For frequent users, it may not always be obvious that a resource could be inaccessible to guests to that websites.
[edit] Session IDs
Some websites append session IDs to URLs, which may reference personal or account information, and therefore poses a security and privacy risk. Usually, you can edit a URL to remove the session ID, and it will still work.
