The banner at the top of my website says I am a “scholar, writer, computer geek.” As a good little scholar, when I write something based on other sources, especially if I quote them, I must give as close to a scholarly citation as I can. The point is that you’re not supposed to have to take my word for anything. You can go to the original sources and check things out for yourself.
There are rules for conventional scholarly sources like journal articles, technical reports, books and book chapters, and even “private communication,” such as what you heard from a friend over coffee break. But for more recent forms of writing, we have to come up with new conventions.
I’ve been citing websites for quite a while, which typically involves just giving page title, author and publication date if known, and a link to the web page. That is sometimes problematic, because some sites don’t provide absolute URLs, but require that you navigate from a homepage down through links that keep modifying your browser cookies to keep track of various things, such as whether you have climbed over their paywall. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with those yet, but I could probably justify not bothering to cite them, or using “private communication.” Perhaps one really needs to describe the navigation path, but life is too short.
Some website links, such as Wikipedia, take you to pages that will change over time. So for a web link, I ought to include the date on which I read the page, so you could use the internet archive (the Wayback Machine) to find the version that I was talking about. So far on this site I haven’t been especially careful, but most of my links in articles about writing are to blog posts that don’t change, at least not much.
I have now reached the point where for the first time I want to cite quotations in an e-book. For quotations from a conventional book, you put the prose in quotes and immediately cite the book and the page number. The trouble is, on my Kobo reader, the page numbers depend on the font size you are using. So far the best I can think of is to refer to a citation as “page 18 of 387” and force you to do the math to figure out where it will be with your favorite font size where your last page is 517.
If anyone has a better idea, let me know.
Scholar, Writer, Computer Geek