Lisa Gold, Research Maven, takes apart Chris Anderson’s shoddy editorial work lifting passages from Wikipedia and his shoddier excuses for why he did it.
It is ridiculous for Anderson to claim that he removed his footnotes because he was “unable to find a good citation format for web sources.” As I mentioned in my previous post, there are many authoritative citation standards which can easily be found in style manuals and websites. Even Wikipedia itself gives you nine different citation formats (including Chicago and MLA) for each entry. Anderson says his publisher insisted on a timestamp for each URL, which Anderson found “clumsy and archaic,” so he cut out the footnotes. WRONG! And don’t even get me started on the whole “write-through” thing.