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Contents 1 Documentation 2 Discussion 2.1 A reputable source? 2.2 I intended it to be used for "official" emails 2.3 MLA and APA have e-mail citation formats 2.4 Cite archives only 2.5 Orion Nebula

[edit] Documentation

[edit] Discussion

[edit] A reputable source?

Is email a reputable source? Otherwise, there's no need for the template. Computerjoe's talk 17:27, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I was asking myself what this template is good for. It isn't used anywhere. But I thought giving it's creator some more time. It is a relatively new template. --Ligulem 17:33, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Blogs (unless it is a big blog) and email aren't reputable sources. Therefore, this is pointless. If, in some obscure circumstance email was needed to be, and allowed, to be used as a source {{Cite web}} would have to be used. Computerjoe's talk 18:56, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

1) I've left a message on the creator's talk page [1]. (2) There is already a request for a cite blog, see category talk:citation templates. I agree that cite web could possibly used as a replacement for cite blog and cite email. But I would propose to be kind and not to do TfD in such an early stage. New things always start a bit immature. Don't kill the little plants. Wait and see how they blossom. If they are not useful, they are not used in articles anyway and can be TfD later. I wouldn't say that an email cannot be a reputable source. An email can be put on a website. Then it can be cited as a source. For example, there are mailing list archives on the web. An example email could be this. --Ligulem 20:33, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Is there a clause in some policy which says email and blogs aren't reputable? I can't remember which one. Computerjoe's talk 20:53, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I've used the template for this email: [2]. It's good for direct interviews and quotations from personal correspondence. Thanks. Aaрон Кинни (t) 17:50, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I intended it to be used for "official" emails

I intended it to be used for things from mailing lists of small organizations that wouldn't have in-depth websites. The first place I used it was the Scarsdale High School article. I could have gotten the emails from the archives online too, so I didn't really need to cite the emails. Still, it may be useful for someone if the mailing list doesn't have have archives. All formats of bibliographic citation of which I know include a format for citing emails, so I'm sure there's some situation in which it will be useful. Tom 15:12, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. I looked into the history of Scarsdale High School and saw that the email references had been removed in this edit. That's why I found no uses ("What links here" was empty) under the previous name of this template (Email reference), so I moved it to cite email without further bothering and asked admins to delete the remaining redirect.

A problem I have with this template here is that it has now "URL accessed on {{{accessdate}}}", but there is apperently no url specified. I previously thought that the parameter "email" could be an url, but now I see you had set this to the email address in Scarsdale High School. I believe for an email to cite, said email should have been published somewhere to be citeable. So there should be a way to publicly access such an email. Therefore we need the information how to gain access to such an email. I believe there should be at least an url to an online archive. I do have problems to see how an email that's not in a public archive should be cited in Wikpedia. If something shall be citeable, it must have been published and possibly archived somewhere, at least on the web. --Ligulem 15:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Ligulem, what would you do for personal or telephone interview? -- Avi 23:58, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I doubt that this can be used in articles as a source. As long as such an interview is not published anywhere (in a journal, newspaper, book or at least on the web – it must be accessible in a public archive), we cannot cite it, because it is not verifyable. But I'm not sure whether I fully understood what you meant by this. --Ligulem 07:38, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

If I am helping to edit an article on Michael Eisner, for example, and I interviewed him over the phone. If I were writing a newspaper/magazine article or a paper for a journal, there are standard citation methods for such interviews. What are the Wiki analogues? -- Avi 12:02, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Please keep an eye on WP:NOR. And see WP:CITE. --Ligulem 13:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] MLA and APA have e-mail citation formats

E-mail has come of age. If, for example, the article about a person is enhanced by e-mail correspondence with that person, that is no different than a personal or telephone interview (neither of which has a citation template yet) and it should be cited as such. -- Avi 23:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

No, because this falls under Original Research, which is expressly forbidden. Take for example the article on Bob Bemer. It's quite possible that a Wikipedian could have emailed him and asked for info to fill in some gaps in the article. In fact I think that may have happened. The position of Wikipedia is that the editor is doing original research, so the info he got from Bemer would not be acceptable to put in the article. However, if Bemer posted the info to an archived mailing list at the behest of the researcher, then that published and globally accessible archive might possibly, as I argue below, be used as a secondary source. To be responsible, the article would have to say that the information comes from a post titled such-and-such, on date such-and-such, to mailing list whatever, as archived (i.e. republished) by publisher foo at URL bar, accessed on whatever date…—mjb 23:11, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cite archives only

Email can never be cited as a primary source. How could it? You can't even reliably identify an email message - the subject, date, and author are worthless for me to refer to the email. Email is almost always a private publication, so by the terms of WP:V you're never allowed to say "JoeBlow stated in email that…" even if he sent the email to everyone in the world. No one could go look at email to confirm that the statement was made unless it's offered through some public IMAP server, and even then, its reliability could be questioned. So it's not even meeting one of the basic tenets of verifiability. And no, you can't refer to the Message-ID header, because like all headers, it can be (and often is) forged, or non-unique, or missing altogether.

If properly cited, though, I believe secondary sources can be used. For example, you could say "a Washington Post article reported that JoeBlow stated in an email that…". I believe that a mailing list archive can be acceptable as a secondary source, as well, especially if it purports to be an unedited official archive under the control of the mailing list administrator. I was unable to locate any definitive statements of policy about this, but WP:V quotes and makes reference to a message attributed to Jimmy Wales in a mailing list archive, so presumably people think an official list archive is a reliable enough source. I doubt it would be cited if the secondary source were something other than that official mailing list archive, though. For example, we can't use The Pirate Bay's little archive of threatening emails they've received from lawyers as a reliable source of information about the content of the emails. We could say that Pirate Bay claims they received emails and letters with this content, but we can't say "the MPAA sent Pirate Bay an email saying…".

So what should be done with this template? I came here looking for something like Template:Cite web, but specialized for mailing list archives. Maybe it could be reworked for that purpose? Do you think this is the direction we should go?—mjb 23:11, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

By all means: use Template:Cite web. I doubt this template here is useful. Maybe we should even slap a deprecate notice on it or outright TfD it. It isn't used anyway and the original creator now has had enough time to fiddle with it. --Ligulem 00:14, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this template is currently useless, but until I'm convinced another template will suffice, I'd rather not TfD it. My problem with Template:Cite web is just that it doesn't make it easy to say that the reference is to a republished email in an automated archive. However, maybe this is something that could be added to that template. The main things I'd want to see are just " (archived email)" following the title (but not linked) and a similar qualifier on the publisher, which would be the archive. Also I'm wondering what the best way would be to reference something that's posted on a mailing list and a newsgroup and vice-versa (comp.lang.python and python-list, for example: post to one, it shows up in both). mjb 09:13, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. It's a bit cumbersome to have yet another template for just another reference to The Web. Couldn't you encode the info that you refer to an email of an archive into the title text of a {{cite web}} call? On another note there is a {{cite newsgroup}} (just in case you haven't seen that). And well, I'm not so convinced that adding that " (archived email)" idea thing to {{cite web}} would be good. So it boils down to the question what's less bad then. It's indeed better if we encode the email-bit information right into the template name so that everybody sees what it's about. So probably an adapted fork (sigh) of the template code of {{cite web}} might do it. We could just take over this location here (I mean just overwrite this template code here). --Ligulem 09:28, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Orion Nebula

I'm using this template in the Orion nebula article to cite an email from a reputable source correcting information. I note that the senddate = 2006-10-19 does not format as I would expect as is done for {{cite web}} dates. WilliamKF 20:24, 19 October 2006 (UTC)