Citing to and Quoting from Wikipedia: Some Basic Tenets

If you are going to quote Wikipedia, do the following (at a minimum):

1)    Own up to the fact that you quoted Wikipedia.

2)    Verify the sources beforehand. 

3)    Make sure the material does not employ the fallacy of vicious abstraction. 

Some Basic Tenets for Citing and Quoting Wikipedia

After reading an absurd status update on Facebook, I vented by writing a lengthy response. But I decided to sleep on it before posting what I had written—and the next day I no longer felt that strong desire to stir up contention on Facebook with the person who posted the comment. My decision was not because I feared ruining a friendship—since there really was no friendship between us to begin with—but rather that no one would have learned anything from my attempt to stir up the participants to seek truth. Please choose to learn something from their mistakes.

Since this happened close to two months ago, it's time to post what I wrote. I have redacted real names for both the person who posted this status update —let’s call him Homer Simpson—and the people who responded—now known as Barney Stinson (Barny S. to his friends) and Meredith Palmer. Fictional names are used only to protect the identity of the not-so-wise.

Homer Simpson

Barney Stinson

Meredith Palmer

And here’s where my comment would have gone:

I am glad to see people enthusiastic about different political and economic views—not to mention enthusiastic about the Founding Fathers—having an open discussion. So please, do not misunderstand the intent of what I am about to say. This discussion went awry from the very beginning with Homer Simpson’s use of a purported quotation he attributes to Thomas Jefferson, calling it Jefferson’s “redistribution and regulation rhetoric.” 

There are several problems here, but I will point out only a few with the hope that we can all learn something in our search for truth.

1) If you are going to quote Wikipedia, own up to that fact. Admitting that you are quoting Wikipedia is something far more respectable than posting a link to a 900-plus page book that Wikipedia cites for one of two sources supporting the quoted proposition. Here is the appropriate citation for the quotation you have attributed to Jefferson: 

Jeffersonian Democracy, Economics subheading, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeffersonian_democracy&oldid=452022404 (last visited Sept. 29, 2011). 

2) If you are going to quote Wikipedia, verify the sources beforehand. None of the language you quoted is even Thomas Jefferson’s. And the bit you placed in quotation marks (“was a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward.") is attributed to Clay S. Jenkinson, not Thomas Jefferson.^[1]  And come on, do you realize that you used ALL CAPS to EMPHASIZE the word "redistribution"? Why stop there? There is also bold, italic, and underscore. If you are going to put something in all caps for emphasis, you're better off going all out as illustrated here:

The solution Jefferson came up with 'was a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign REDISTRIBUTION downward.'[2]

3) If you are going to quote Wikipedia, make sure the material does not employ the fallacy of vicious abstraction.[3] While the link you provided is to a legitimate source (actual excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's letters and speeches) you gave no specific page number supporting what you quoted. Again, this goes back to problem number two: nothing you quoted is from The Jefferson Cyclopedia. Here is the viciously abstracted quotation cited in footnote 30 of the Wikipedia article that was taken from page 849 of The Jefferson Cyclopedia:

These revenues will be levied entirely on the rich .... The Rich alone use imported article [sic], and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. The poor man ... pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture also, as is probable, he will pay nothing.[4]

This Jefferson quote, if read carefully, still has nothing to do with a graduated income tax. But one could be misled by this footnote quotation because it has been divorced from the surrounding context. The quote also uses a few sets of ellipses, a very convenient tool for omitting material one does not want to quote. 

In reality, Jefferson is not talking about income tax at all—he is talking about tariffs. The full quotation, including its surrounding context, is provided here (and I have placed in bold, red text only the part that the Wikipedia article viciously abstracted):

8255. Tariff, Burdens of.—I wish it were possible to increase the impost on any articles affecting the rich chiefly, to the amount of the sugar tax so that we might relinquish that at the next session. But this must depend on our receipts keeping up. As to the tea and coffee tax, the people do not regard it. The next tax which an increase of revenue should enable us to suppress, should be the salt tax, perhaps; indeed, the production of that article at home is already undermining that tax. (citation omitted) (1802).
 8256.— —. The revenue on the consumption of foreign articles, is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboards and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask, what farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?—SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. viii, 41. FORD, ed., viii, 343. (1805.)
 8257.— —. These revenues will be levied entirely on the rich, the business of household manufacture being now so established that the farmer and laborer clothe themselves entirely. The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. The poor man, who uses nothing but what is made in his own farm or family, or within his own country, pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture also, as is probable, he will pay nothing. Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus added to canals, roads, schools, &c., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.*—TO GENERAL KOSCIUSKO. v, 586. (M., 1811).[5]

For a better understanding of Jefferson’s actual views on taxation and economy, I suggest you read (at the very least) pages 849 to 859 of The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia. Now, here is an actual quote by Jefferson on taxation:

“Taxes on consumption like those on capital or income, to be just, must be uniform."[6]

Did that say uniform taxes on income? Now, while I don't pretend to know what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote these words or what he meant—in particular—by the word uniform, I do know that he did not mean a graduated tax.

4) Even if everything else I have written here were wrong, it should come as no surprise that “Jefferson sounds kinda like [insert liberal politician, daresay Obama]”: Jefferson was a Democrat (maybe). Half of the Congress passed a bill to declare by law that Jefferson was a Democrat.[7] I guess, for one reason or another, the other half of congress just could not agree to that. If the original quotation actually had been Thomas Jefferson's words, your comment implying that Jefferson sounds a lot like President Obama comes off as a compliment, rather than a slight, to President Obama. Perhaps you meant it as a compliment?

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Special thanks to Greg Israelsen for finding this hilarious comic:

Originally posted at xkcd.

For a rather deft blog post on citing to Wikipedia in appellate briefs, see Don Cruse, How to Cite to Wikipedia in Appellate Briefs, Supreme Court of Tex. Blog (Nov. 17, 2011), http://www.scotxblog.com/practice-notes/how-to-cite-to-wikipedia-in-appellate-briefs/.

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[1] See Clay S. Jenkinson, Becoming Jefferson's People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century 26 (2004).

[2] Jeffersonian Democracy, Economics subheading, Wikipedia (quadruple emphasis added), http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeffersonian_democracy&oldid=452022404 (last visited Sept. 29, 2011).

[3] For a very rough explanation of the fallacy of vicious abstraction, see Kellyanne Hanrahan, Criteria of Truth: Vicious Abstraction, N.Y. Fool, http://bit.ly/pMApZV (last visited Sept. 29, 2011). 

[4] The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia 849 (John P. Foley, ed. 1900), available at http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id=2D0gAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA849 (last visited Sept. 29, 2011).

[5] Id.

[6] Id. at 857.

[7] See A Bill to Establish a Commission to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the Establishment of the Democratic Party of the United States, S. 2047, 102d Cong. (1991) (as passed by Senate, Nov. 25, 1991), available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c102:S.2047.CPS:.