The Skull Cinema

In the course of preparing a draft model citation for the OED on Wikipedia I have, of course, run into a few minor edits that could be attended to while I worked on the task at hand. The first thing that caught my eye was an unlinked name in the sentence, That turned out not to be so, Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. A quick search revealed a Wiki page for Philip Lyttelton Gell , so I added a Wikilink to that sentence as follows, turned out not to be so, and [[Philip Lyttelton Gell|Philip Gell]] of the OUP forced The edit shows some more of the Wiki mark-up language, double square brackets ( [[…]] ) denoting a Wikilink and the use of a piped link ( [[ wiki page title | text displayed ]] ) to display the link with a different text to the title of the linked page. In the same sentence, I noted that the abbreviati...

In the post on Setting up a Wikipedia account I made a simple edit; adding a reference to the Wikipedia page for Tonneau . As I was short of time I left the edit factually complete but partly finished, hoping that another editor might come along and tidy it up. A quick check reveals that the edit is unaltered. So, now that I have the time (and a need for a non-method post ) I shall go back and clean up my own mess. But first let's take a couple of steps back: What is a 'Reference' and why bother anyway? Adding references (from the Latin referre , "to carry back") to a text carries out several functions: 1. They enable an author to condense their work, as the inclusion of references allows them to shorthand content, ideas or assumptions written elsewhere. Also, doing so allows readers to follow how an argument or line of reasoning has come about by looking at the same references and following the breadcrumbs. For example; I reference Newton's ...