[thaumasiotes]

So, summing this all up:

(1) abnercoimbre (a) read through the document, (b) extracted the part of it that affected passengers are most likely to be interested in, and (c) helpfully provided a summary of that part;

(2) jabiko (a) didn't bother reading the document, (b) assumed abnercoimbre was lying about what it said, and (c) accused abnercoimbre of "spreading misinformation";

(3) The underlying problem here is that abnercoimbre's behavior was bad, whereas jabiko provided a reasonable response to seeing an entirely truthful summary that consisted only of a direct, unaltered quote from the primary source.

That's an interesting perspective. I might lean another way.

[msl]

You will notice that the provided quote is not from the submitted page[1] but from another page[2] on the same site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this page that assumes that quotes on top level comments are sourced from the submitted page unless otherwise noted.

Mind you, I'm not defending jabiko here – I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.

[1] https://news.alaskaair.com/on-the-record/alaska-statement-on...

[2] https://www.alaskaair.com/content/advisories/travel-advisori...

[thaumasiotes]

> I responded to the following comment: "Welcome to the web. Pages often have hyperlinks that can be followed to see related information." which I did not find reasonable.

But you're wrong about that. Would you consider a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book to be a couple hundred documents, or just one?

The text abnercoimbre quoted was explicitly referenced on the page as being the airline's policy toward affected "guests". Anyone looking for that information would have found it, because... it's included in the document. It's not like the quote was pulled from the "investor relations" page after abnercoimbre clicked a link in the generic site-wide topbar for no reason.

Try a different angle: suppose that link to the travel policy went to an outdated page that Alaska Airlines disavowed. The old page, for whatever reason, specifies a set of benefits that they are absolutely unwilling to offer, and that they haven't offered for 5+ years.

Would you consider the statement "A flexible travel policy [link to outdated policy] is in place to support our guests" to be an inaccuracy in the document, even though it is literally true that a flexible travel policy is in place to support their guests?

If you would, how can you fail to consider the correct link to the correct policy as being "part of the document"?

[msl]

I worry we're veering very much off topic, so let me state, for the benefit of anyone thinking that this is still about the original comment, that I consider the quote provided by abnercoimbre to be both correct and relevant to the submitted topic. The rest of this comment is not about that.

No, I do not consider a document to be a part of another document, unless it's embedded in the other document. I don't, for example, consider the RFC 2822 [1] to be a part of the RFC 5322 [2] event though they are obviously related and the latter refers (and, indeed, links) to the former. If, in a conversation about the 5322, someone quoted the 2822 without providing a reference to it, I would find it confusing.

As for "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, I'll have to admit that I don't have much experience with them, but from what I believe I know about them, I'd say that I would not consider the whole book to be a single document when it comes to referencing. Would it make sense to say something like "The adventure in the book ends with you caught by the security guard" if that is just one of the many alternative endings, one that many might not encounter when playing?

And expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)

The other example is interesting. I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2822

[2] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322

[thaumasiotes]

> expanding on that, would you consider it appropriate referencing to say "That is a crime according to the French criminal law" without specifying where it says that? (I'm assuming here that the French criminal law is a single document.)

Not really; there are two issues, of which I think one supports you much more strongly than the other one does.

First (supporting you more), the French criminal law is a very large document. Appropriate referencing should include a more reliable way to find the relevant text than "it's in there somewhere".

Second, whether something is a crime according to any particular body of criminal law is generally a subjective question that cannot be definitively answered by reading the text of the law, even if you read it all. Because of this, appropriate referencing demands that you provide the text which you are interpreting to mean that the particular events under discussion constitute a crime.

This second point seems more important to me. If you say that's a crime according to the French criminal law, which states '[direct quote]', that's a good reference even though you don't specify where in the law your text is found. If you provide the location of the text you're thinking of, but not the text itself, that's a much worse reference, even though it's still better than just waving at "the French criminal law".

But part of that calculation is the fact that I expect, if I have a genuine quote in my hand, that I'll be able to locate where in the law it came from. Bodies of law are generally pretty good about this. Hundreds of years ago, specifying where in the law a direct quote occurred would have been more important.

(Issues with citing the law get even worse than this; judgments that postdate the law can have dramatic effects on its meaning without triggering any change in its official wording.)

> I would consider a wrong (or broken) link to be an error in the document, but I would not consider erroneous statements in the linked document to be inaccuracies or errors in the linking document. Imagine that instead of an outdated policy, the linked document was one promoting homeopathy. Would you say that the original document contains misleading statements about healthcare? I would not.

I wouldn't, but that's because the link specifies that it details Alaska Airlines' customer support policy. If the same thing happened in a Mayo Clinic page outlining their view of homeopathy, then that document would be making misleading statements about healthcare.

If a delayed passenger called Alaska Airlines and said "in your statement about the outage, it mentions that you reimburse affected passengers for any hotel accommodations they may have made without limitation" (and that is an accurate description of the mistakenly-linked outdated policy), do you think it would be more accurate for the representative to respond "yes, it does say that, but unfortunately that link goes to an outdated policy and we can't reimburse more than $100", or to respond "no, it doesn't say that. It only says that we have a policy, and our policy is to reimburse up to $100"?