Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia
Sometimes I anally use Bluebook citation in my school notes. So when I pulled a quote from Wikipedia regarding a case, I needed to cite it. Wikipedia provides guidance on this:
Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia
Wikipedia cites the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology for this template:
[Signal] Wikipedia, [article], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article] [(optional other parenthetical)] (as of [date], [time] GMT).
The citation for this entry would be:
See Wikipedia, Bluebook, http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/Bluebook (as of Aug. 30, 2006, 12:22 GMT).
To get the timestamp, you should use the latest revision date and time, obtainable by clicking on the “History” tab at the top of the entry’s web page. The first timestamp is the latest, and therefore the one you should use.
(I just anonymously edited the Bluebook entry, fixing some typos in the citation. 
)
January 30th, 2007 at 1:20 am
[…] This issue could be helped by using the Harvard suggestion for citing Wikipedia. The Harvard citation format requires one to cite to the time in the article’s history that you are citing. By clicking on the history tab at the top of an article, one may then navigate to the actual text that the clerk has cited. (Also, maybe it shouldn’t be that “judges” are citing Wikipedia, as much as their law clerks are.) The deeper issue is that encylopedic knowledge is harder to find and less trustworthy than it used to be–back when we had no other “better” option. Other than Wikipedia, my best bets are Encarta or Britannica (both of which charge for usage) or the Columbia Encyclopedia. But none are as exhaustive as Wikipedia. […]
May 19th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Good site - you’re a pretty good writer….. Very creative…
September 8th, 2007 at 10:54 am
This is a great entry. There is at least one narrow area of law where proper citation to Wikipedia is extremely important. In trademark prosecution, you often have to look for evidence of how a word or phrase is understood by the general public. Wikipedia has specifically been allowed as a source of evidence on that issue, both for prosecutors and the government examiners (it’s probative value is constantly questioned, but it’s not rejected out of hand).