References/Notes
References: Notes
As in any research project it is important to attribute content to the original author or source, and to acknowledge copyright.
As this website has developed two issues became apparent:-
- Information can be attributed to a source, Malaysia Airlines for example, but the relevant documents are not available at the original locations, the original URLs are not valid, the content has been archived, or the organisation has been renamed, restructured or does not exist.
So in addition to a reference identifying the original document and author it is valuable to provide current data on where that resource can be found. - Some documents, or news media articles, may have been referenced many times on many articles within this website. Those references needed to be updated with information about how to locate the referenced item, and it would be difficult to keep all of those instances current and correct.
Therefore, in 2024 it was decided to consolidate all references into a separate Section of this website and to have one only citation per item, to be accessed within this Reference Section.
Each instance of a reference in any article or website content would be simply a link to this unique citation. The in-page link would be a short link in superscript like this SCMP-049.
The Letter and Number Code used would be based on an abbreviation of the source name, followed by a number which would usually indicate the number of days since the loss of MH370.
In this example, SCMP is an abbreviation for South China Morning Post and the relevant article published on Day 049 which was 25 April 2014.
Reference ID
References to sources of information or data used in this website have been collected to form a Reference Section.
Each reference has also been allocated a unique identifier, a Reference ID. Instead of repeating the full text of a reference whenever it has been used, the Reference ID is written in superscript and is linked to the details of the reference in one of the pages in this Section. The purpose is to describe the reference or source only once for the entire website. This will ensure that any updates to the information are centralised.
Each Reference ID has the format Source-Type-Date:-
- Source - An abbreviation of the department, company or media name plus an optional country code, for example NSTMY (New Straits Times, Malaysia).
- Type of document or referenced item. Some examples are:-
- MS - Media Statement
- RPT - Report
- DOC - Other type of Document
- TSCP - Transcript
- WEB - Web Page
- IMG - Image
- Date - for most items this is a Day Number which relates to the number of days since MH370 went missing. This schema is used on News Items. See the News Index.
Variations could be the year when the item was published, or a more complete date.
News Media References
Abbreviations used for News Media companies are listed on the page References/Media/Sources.
Reference IDs for Media Articles are generally in the format Source-Day_Number, where the Source is a contraction of the publisher name plus a two-letter country code.
On-Page References
On-page references at the end of an article may be combined with explanatory notes.
Instead of a full reference in any of the academic formats, on-page references have generally been limited to a basic attribution combined with a Reference ID.
Each Reference ID is linked to a specific item on a sub-page in the References section. Each item referenced by this method is accompanied by a valid URL indicating where the item may be found. Wherever practical this also includes links to snapshots collected by the Internet Archive.
Extracts are generally presented on a white background.