For example, there are many answers that cite Wikipedia. An example is this recent answer where I quoted Wikipedia in the following manner:
The modern name has two parts: Plym and mouth. The element Plym is taken from the River Plym along which it traded with its parent settlement of Plympton, but its name (first recorded as Plymentun in c. 900) is considered to derive from the Old English word for 'plum tree', also ploumenn in Cornish, though the local civic association suggests an alternative derivation from the Celtic Pen-lyn-don ("fort at the head of a creek"). An alternative derivation is from Latin plumbum album 'British/white lead' -meaning tin - where plomm is also Cornish for lead.
Now, this is not exactly how the original text looks. The original Wikipedia article has footnotes referencing the source of the information in the passage; these footnotes are marked in-line with superscripted numerals in brackets that hyperlink to the bottom of the page. Like this:
The modern name has two parts: Plym and mouth. The element Plym is taken from the River Plym along which it traded with its parent settlement of Plympton, but its name (first recorded as Plymentun in c. 900) is considered to derive from the Old English word for 'plum tree',[1] also ploumenn in Cornish,[2] though the local civic association suggests an alternative derivation from the Celtic Pen-lyn-don ("fort at the head of a creek").[3] An alternative derivation is from Latin plumbum album 'British/white lead' -meaning tin - where plomm is also Cornish for lead.[4]
[...]
- Watts, Victor (2010). The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 475–6. ISBN 978-0-521-16855-7.
- http://www.howlsedhes.co.uk/cgi-bin/diskwe.pl
- "Plympton Castle". Plympton St Maurice Civic Association. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
- The ancient language and the dialect of Cornwall, Fred W.P. Jago 1882, Truro
As a matter of site policy on the format of quotations, do I need to, or should I, include the superscripted numerals? If I do, should I include the text of the footnote citations, or at least a link to them? Should I just avoid this problem by not posting extensive quotes from Wikipedia?
I'm currently looking up questions where the general issue has been discussed on the main site.
The following seem somewhat relevant:
- How to use in-text citation for a sentence in an article that also uses in-text citation?
- In my example, how do I use in-text citation?
(although the two above deal with in-line citation)
Plagiarism: How to cite the citation of your source? (kind of the opposite situation: this person cited only the original and not the immediate source, and was subject to charges of plagiarism)
When citing a French citation in the original, should the guillemets (angle quotes) be changed? What about punctuation order? (the top voted answer and some of the comments suggest that even minor details of punctuation in a citation should not be silently changed or tidied up)
- Ibid source citing source