A Scholarly Punctilio
Is it 'kosher' from a scholarly point of view to add hyperlinks to a passage one is quoting, given that the author may or may not approve of what is on the other end of the link? The sense of a passage depends on its context, and hyperlinkage alters the context. I would say that there is no problem if it is clear, or is made clear, that the links have been supplied by the quoter.
Adding a hyperlink is like italicizing or bolding: the provenience of the sense-altering orthographical modification should be apparent to the reader.
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Friday November 4, 2005 at 11:15am
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.