PBC:Videos as references
 | This is a guidance essay containing the advice of one or more PBC contributors. It is not a PBC policy or guideline, although it may be consulted for assistance. |
 | This page in a nutshell: How to cite movies, documentaries, TV programs and other video as references. |
It's okay to cite movies, TV programs and videos as references, as long as they meet the reliable source criteria for other sources. The appropriateness of any source depends on the context. In general, the best sources have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments.
Even though PBC is an online encyclopedia, there is no distinction between using on-line and off-line sources as references.
Citing the point in a video source where the sourced content appears greatly improves verifiability.
Movies as references
To cite a movie or video as a reference, you should give at least the following information: the title, the date of release, the publisher, the medium (motion picture, television production, videotape, DVD, etc.). You may also want to note the time (roughly what time, if accessible, a scene occurs within a production - useful for citing specific scenes, quotations or data), the language, a brief description of who or what is portrayed in the video source, the geographic location of the publisher, and an identification number (OCLC, ISBN, etc.) You can use the {{cite video}} template (click on the "cite video" tag) to help you format this information. You can copy and paste the template from the "Usage" section of that page. The guidelines for completing each field also appear there in the "Descriptions" section of the template's page. Not all fields are required. Sites such as IMDb and Amazon often have the data you will need.
Television programs as references
Editors may use the {{cite episode}} template to cite specific television programs as references. Not all fields are required, but the more information provided, the easier the source will be to verify.
YouTube videos as references
YouTube and similar sites do not have editorial oversight engaged in scrutinizing content so editors need to watch out for the potential unreliability of the user uploading the video. There are channels for videos uploaded by agencies and organizations generally considered reliable such as that of the Associated Press on YouTube.
If you want to cite a video you saw on YouTube as a source, such as an excerpt from a documentary or TV program, don't use the YouTube information, but instead find the original movie or TV program's data (a web search should be sufficient to find this information if you know the title). Sites such as imdb and Amazon often have the data you will need. If you provide readers with the necessary data, they can search a video out on YouTube themselves. You can use the {{cite video}} or {{cite episode}} templates if you like. If the title on YouTube differs from the title of the actual video being used as a source, you can put the YouTube title in the "quote" field of the template like this: |quote=YouTube title: Two Men in Dallas Part 2
You should be fairly certain that the content in the YouTube video is indeed actually from the source you are citing. Please take care to verify this.
Anyone can create a website or video and then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For this reason, self-published media as seen on YouTube are often not acceptable sources. Self-published videos may be used as sources of information about their creator if they meet the requirements seen at restrictions on using self-published sources.
Editors should also consider if the content being referenced is truly encyclopedic if the best citation that can be made points to YouTube.
External links
Links to YouTube or other user-submitted video sites must abide by PBC's External links guidelines (see Restrictions on linking and Links normally to be avoided). Many videos hosted on YouTube or similar sites do not meet the standards for inclusion in External links sections.
Location of cited part
When citing books or unusually long journal articles, an editor must specify the page number(s). Similarly, some means of specifying the location of the referenced content from a video is strongly encouraged, so that editors and reviewers can quickly locate the part of a video being referenced.
See also
- PBC:Videos - technical information about using video on PBC