First attempt at a strange web page

Welcome, Cryptoref.

Turn to the QuickStart Guide on the gray pages tipped into the front of EE. On the page headed "The Basics: Publications: Print & Online," you see this:

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You’ll notice that the name of the author or creator appears in plain type, but the title of a standalone publication—like a book or a website—is italicized. Your readers need this visual clue to tell them what is the author and what is the website.

Your QuickStart Guide goes on to tell you that if you are citing a book with different chapters or a website with different “articles” or databases, then the title of the article/chapter/database is added to the start of this citation.

     1. “Title of Article/Chapter/Database,” Author-Creator, Title of Publication: Subtitle  (Publication Place: date), page no. or specific content

If the article/chapter/database has an author or creator different from the author-creator of the book/website, then that article/chapter/database author is added at the start of the citation before the title of what they created. In this case, what you want to cite does not have an individual author.

You’ll also note that the “Title of Article/Chapter/Database,” is placed in quotation marks. This, too, is a visual clue needed by the readers of your citation—and by you, yourself, after your recollection of this source has gone cold. Italics are used for titles of books/website. Quotation marks are used for exact titles of parts of that book/website.

Now let’s analyze your two citations. (You label one as “Citation” and one as “Source List.” But both are citations. One is in reference note format—i.e., footnote or endnote—the other would be the Source List Entry, but both are citations.)

Reference Note: Here, before the parentheses, you have three items, all in plain type:

• Cedar Lake Ventures
• Weather Spark
• Lesja Weather

The type is all the same. Without italics and quotation marks, your reader doesn’t have a clue what is the name of the author/creator, what’s the name of the article/database, and what’s the name of the website.

Source List Entry:  Here, your first three items, all in plain type, are these:

• Cedar Lake Ventures
• Weather Spark
• The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth, updated daily

It's not clear why your third item differs between one citation and the other. If they represent the Author/Creator and the "Title" or Title, they should be the same in both cases.

Using the link you provided, your reader can see that Cedar Lake Ventures is the name of the creator and that Weather Spark is the name of the website. But then we’re still in a quandary over the third item.

At the link that you give us, I searched the page for a specific item titled “Lesja weather” or “The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth, updated daily” but I did not find either of those phrases.

Going back to the basic format from the QuickStart Guide, you’ll notice that after the parenthetical publication data (Place = URL : Date), we identify the specific item within that book or website in which we are interested. This field is not used in a generic Source List Entry, but it is essential in a Reference Note that supports a specific assertion. This field is empty in your draft citation.

All these issues are related. So let’s rethink things.  The website you are using is this:

 

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Obviously, this is not a website like The Washington Post or Ancestry whose front page offers us many different articles or databases. This site is basically a search engine where we can type in a city or airport and then get a blurb for that specific place. At the home page, we see that the website’s title is composed of both a title and a subtitle:

Weather Spark: The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth

To get to the page that you cited, we must use a search term. There’s no option to select any article title or database title.

All points considered, a basic Reference Note Citation to this website would be this:

     1. Cedar Lake Ventures, Weather Spark: The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth  (https://weatherspark.com : accessed 7 March 2020), search term: Lesja Norway.

 

The resulting page is filed with all sorts of stuff, mostly ads, but the item of interest is the one in this snippet:

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The title of this new item is "Average Weather in Lesja Norway." Because this is title, we have options. We can choose to use a more specific citation that takes us directly to the page. That's obviously the citation you prefer. For this, we would make three alterations:

• First, we’d cite the long URL that you give;
• Second, we would cite the exact title of the article/blurb that we are citing.
• Third, we'd add the important descriptor you used that helps your reader understand the nature of the data being delivered—i.e., "updated daily."

The result would be this:

   1. Cedar Lake Ventures, Weather Spark: The Typical Weather Anywhere on Earth  (https://weatherspark.com : accessed 7 March 2020), “Average Weather in Lesja Norway,” updated daily.

 

One further suggestion would help you tremendously, Cryptoref. You’ll notice that the first page of the QuickStart Guide has this instruction:

Step 1. Smile. This manual is hefty, but don’t sweat the size. You will digest it in bits and pieces ….

Step 2. Read chapters 1 and 2. These are the basic principles that apply to almost everything we do ….

That Step 2 really is important. Source citation isn't about some rigid formula to be followed. It's communication. We are telling our readers (and ourselves at a later date after our recollection of the source has gone cold) what it is we are using.

However, communication is always guided by a certain set of rules, whether it’s oral or written. Chapter 2 lays out those longstanding communication rules for citing sources so that everyone understands what we are citing. They’re also the rules that help us understand what it is we are using.

Incidentally, there are also problems with the Source List Entry you’ve drafted above, but this dissection of the Reference Note should give you the basics you need to straighten out the Source List Entry without my adding another thousand words.

 

You catch on quickly, cryptoref. Yes, you may use either of those two reference notes. There are arguments pro and con, as you've laid out. The choice is up to you.

Regarding the source list entry, a couple of small tweaks are needed. In a source list entry, each field of the citation is separated by a period and publication data is not put in parentheses. This means you need to:

• Replace the comma after the creator's name.
• Place a period after Earth.
• Remove the parentheses.

(And no, these aren't just EE's persnickety rules. This represents the longstanding convention for most citation guides. There are good reasons, but it's took long and persnickety an explanation to make here.)

As for my knees, I'm not sure what you saw on Google, but it sounds like I've been knee-capped somewhere or else Google thinks I do too much praying or gardening. <g>

cryptoref, you ask "On the two formats the ... question is can I mix in the same document?" I have to ask you a question back. Are you asking if you can mix citation formats in a narrative or research report you are writing? If so, in historical research, documents are the official records that we use—not the derivative accounts that we create from an assortment of materials and our conclusions about them. An exception would be if you are creating material for submission in a court filing, in which case your work would become an official document. 

If you are asking about "mixing" the two citation formats in the same narrative or report you are writing, then the answer is yes. We have optional formats for most things because different records and different databases require different structures.