When in Doubt: Wik it Out!

A truly robust source of information, the Wikipedia offers several suggested methods of citing Internet-published, written works, and other media such as audio and video.
The Wikipedia also offers an excellent resource for understanding Citation methods in general.

An MLA Standard Derivative

As a University ungergraduate, I majored in Curriculum and Instruction with an academic focus on Communications: English. In other words, many of the courses I completed were designed to help me to learn to Educate others in the proper use of the English language.

Influenced by my academic background, I realize the benefit of consistent bibliographic notation in any text which contains reference to other works. I also recognize the aeasthetic value in maintaining a single style for such citing authoritative, or other original work, and that one technique must be used throughout the text for improving legibility. Although there may be many different ways to communicate the same information, or more than one Standard recommended by Universities– and ultimately different methods employed throughout the world– I believe there is a benefit to consistency. I advocate the use of Web Standards, as well as the perpetuation of Standards in other media. One standard you may use day to day, for example, has been adopted for organizing Mp3 audio data: the ID3 tag standard which makes it easy to catalog your music, even if you switch to a new media player– because the industry has adopted the ID3 standard.

The Walker⁽¹⁾ style, which i discovered in the web-published writings of Jay Johanson⁽¹⁾ is my preferred method for citing references, and is what i’ve used in my works-cited technique throughout NoviceNotes^™, so the following is the method i recommend when you cite an electronic medium, authored by someone other than yourself:

…Ms Walker calls for putting an access or visit date on the citation rather than a creation or modification date. Walker says that she is planning to revise her proposal to add a version number or revision date. She believes the access date is still essential. 2 (Note that Internet authors are not always thoughtful enough to put a creation or revision date in their documents. Some software will report the file’s computer-generated last-change date, but this is unreliable: it may not be the date the article was actually written, but rather the date it was copied or restored from a back-up.)

The “Walker style” with this modification would be as follows:

Author. “Article title.” Major title. Revision date. URL (access date)

To further embellish upon J. Johansen’s article, according to the Walker / MLA style, this page should be cited like so:

Sabarese, J. “How to Cite Internet Media.” Rev 02/2007. http://novicenotes.com/cite_internet_published_media/ (02/2007)

and Johansen continues…

The “major work” component is be used when a collection of Internet documents are clearly grouped under a title. For example, if you were citing one of the articles from Ohio Right to Life’s “Questions & Answers” section, you might cite it like this:

Willke, Jack & Barbara. “Viability”. Abortion: Questions & Answers. Rev 1991. http://www.ohiolife.org/qa/qa9.htm (12/2000)

Note that this style works for Web pages, files downloaded with FTP, newsgroup messages, etc.

You may prefer another method. Take a look at the Wikipedia’s recommendations, compare it with this, and decide which you like best. No matter what you choose, however, please cite your appropriated material!

⁽¹⁾Johansen, Jay. “Citing Internet Sources.” Rev 9/2000. http://www.pregnantpause.org/admin/cite.htm (02/2007)