How do I cite a tweet?

[0x0]

How about just linking to the tweet on the twitter.com website: https://twitter.com/ReallyVirtual/status/64780730286358528

Or the JSON API, which gives _exact_ times including timezones: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/64780730286358528.jso...

[cleverjake]

I assume you are no t familiar with MLA formatting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MLA_Style_Manual.

It is a style format for written works (newspapers, academic papers, books etc).

This is apparently an accepted form of citing a tweet in an official document. A link does not do anything, as it can be deleted.

[_delirium]

Submitted w/o opinion, I found this comment in a discussion [1] of the general MLA guidelines for websites:

MLA no longer requires the use of URLs in MLA citations. Because Web addresses are not static (i.e., they change often) and because documents sometimes appear in multiple places on the Web (e.g., on multiple databases), MLA explains that most readers can find electronic sources via title or author searches in Internet Search Engines.

[1] http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/

[mmahemoff]

A URL is the only way to go and apart from sheer convenience, it conveys that it's coming from Twitter, instead of the solitary "Tweet" at the end of the MLA's citation. Twitter isn't a timeless utility, it's a company running a service that happens to be popular at this time and in certain countries. You can't just say "Tweet" and expect every reader to always get the meaning of it.

I think it's okay to include the actual text too, as the short length makes it possible to do so and given that tweets don't have any title and are probably less likely to be preserved if Twitter went down than most other online references a scholarly article might cite.

[abraham]

v1 of the Twitter APi is getting killed in a few months and v1.1 requires auth which makes it impossible to directly view the JSON object.

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show/64780730286358528....

[spullara]

Citing a tweet without including its globally unique ID seems terrible. Usernames an be easily changed. Copying the entire contents of the tweet into the citing seems odd as well.

[Osmium]

> Copying the entire contents of the tweet into the citing seems odd as well.

On the contrary, it builds in redundancy. One of the virtues of Twitter is that this approach is feasible because of their character limit, and it means that should anything happen to Twitter (or the internet) in the future, that anything of cultural importance* is preserved. It also allows the tweet to be read offline or in countries where Twitter might be censored or banned, but where the paper is available. Proper citation is just to enable verification if necessary.

(*though admittedly this is probably a very small subset of all tweets)

[bdg]

I absolutely detest MLA style citation. It's overly complex and needlessly adds information where it is not readily useful in context.

[artursapek]

It's a big money-making scheme. They change it all the time to sell more style guides. Complete bullshit. I hate MLA.

[ethnt]

It's terribly inconsistent. I'm in the middle of developing a library to generate citations, and I've had to write out the formatting for each separate type of citation manually (for example, a whole book's title is italicized: in a series, it is underlined).

[waxjar]

Terrible decision. A tweet is just a string of 140 characters or less on a web page. Rules already exist for citing web pages, they seem to work fine.

[whatshisface]

Tweets have a known level of volatility and a strict maximum length. Websites are 100% unpredictable. Why not take advantage of the known tweet properties to optimize this case?

[aes256]

To a lot of people, Twitter isn't a 'web page' per se. Countless consumer devices have Twitter clients that do not in any way resemble a web page.

[mxfh]

I think the most troubling feature is the time convention "time zone of the reader". How should anyone make a valid assumption about that? I think its a better practice to include a common time zone abbreviation.

[blublubblub]

I don't understand why the suggestion wasn't to just convert to UTC. That would solve the problem...

[Serplat]

This bothered me as well, particularly for the example that they provided. The convention may work for tracking conversations, but knowing the exact time that the helicopter was spotted relative to other events seems more important. Yet, by their convention you can only accurately compare it with the time of other cited tweets.

[mtraven]

I think this is the only MLA style that is tied to the offerings of a single commercial entity. That seems weird to me. Does Twitter own the idea of a tweet or has it escaped into the general culture?

[msutherl]

Strange indeed that they use the word "Tweet" when there are many other microblogging services, including Facebook. How does one cite Status.net?

[vacri]

General culture. It seems standard practise now in print and video journalism to quote tweets about whatever current affairs you have: "user FooBar on twitter said 'I don't like this thing'"... regardless of whether FooBar has anything to do with it at all. A lazy way to get bystander comments from people who have even less of a relationship to the happening than bystanders do.

[jmix]

It's strange that when you cite a tweet, MLA wants you to include the tweet contents, whereas for every other citation, they want you to embed just enough info to form a pointer to the actual content. Tweet citations are closer to footnotes than to citations.

Doesn't type check.

[taejo]

Other resources have titles. For a tweet, the title is the contents.

[bennyg]

What about other specific online media? How do I cite a Reddit comment? An insightful meme in QuickMeme (the text could be helpful and part of an overall commentary, regardless of how you feel about memes in general)?

I feel the best thing is like an online source - aka like taking a 140 character quote from a blog post. MLA feel differently, obviously.

[drucken]

Alternatives,

APA:

- http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/10/how-to-cite-twitte...

- http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/10/how-to-cite-twitte...

Chicago:

- http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Do...

- http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

IEEE:

- http://www.york.ac.uk/integrity/ieee.html

[moflo]

To obtain a stable link I've seen some publishers use a service called WebCite (http://www.webcitation.org). It archives the referenced page as the author would have seen it at the time of publication.

[facorreia]

From the MLA Style Manual[1]:

"Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet."

[1] http://www.mla.org/style/style_faq/mlastyle_cite_a_tweet

[lmm]

Why would one ever cite a tweet? You can't write a useful secondary source in 140 characters; surely a tweet is only ever going to be a primary source, like an interview or experiment that you've conducted yourself? While we might include transcripts or raw data in an appendix, we don't really cite such things per se.

[travisp]

Wasn't the example the MLA gave a pretty good one? It was a tweet by a resident of Abbottabad noticing a helicopter, which later turned out to be US Special Forces coming to kill Osama Bin Laden.

[tantalor]

Is it really a citation if you include the entire text? Seems more like a copy.

[d0gsbody]

Dammit, MLA, you had one job...

This is a terrible citation format. It should cite the URL and/or the name of the publishing company (Twitter).

[blankenship]

As a sidenote, I find it humorous that the MLA site can’t be bothered to use real quote marks when quoting something.

[lwf]

MLA has been generally allergic to URLs, which I find sort of obnoxious.

[t1]

Why would you want to do this?