globetrotters.us: TheBeanTeam: br>
And what is MLA format?
Globetrotters.us can you give an example of what you are thinking of for a variable. I think it is a good idea but wonder how it might be applied.
My books are packed, so I may be a little off. MLA is the standard that college students are taught to use to cite their sources in college papers. http://www.mla.org/style
Its a little different depending what you cite, but a Book would be title, author, publisher and page (or something very close). They define it down to what is capitolized, and there the commas go. I think a web page is web page title, URL and date. The date is important because web pages are dynamic.
The MLA format ensures consistency. Personally, I don't use MLA format in my waymarks because I can't remember the exact details. I do try to imclude the elements of citing the source.
If the system auto created the citation from the variables and literals, I would expect it to go like
citation **book (from pulldown)** by Patricia Schultz **date (derived from book)**, **page(variable)**
MLA is only one of the ways to cite sources. APA, Turabian and Chicago are other styles of citations, there's probably more than that too but those are the ones I had to use in school. What really matters though is giving credit where it's due, and since
this isn't an academic area, simply stating where you got the info is
legally good enough. I think that for general work like this, just a plain language citation is great: "I got this info form www..... on August 5th 2009" type thing. Real citations are hard to read. That's just my opinion though.
One thing I know for sure, I love the internet, and the website "
Son of Citation Machine" saved my butt through my undergrad degrees and grad school. It lets you fill in its variables then it puts all those pesky periods, commas and italics in the right place. If you're into that sort of thing.