This sort of citation matter may not be a problem from the standpoint of the general reader. Although there were, as I wrote, things to like about your article, these things that irked me were still what I felt like I should comment on. Not knowing the source of information makes things difficult for historians, scholars, and other thinkers and writers — including journalists. You mention that you’ve run into this sort of murkiness in your research, as have I; it isn’t a purely academic issue in any sense of the word. You’ve noticed this, surely — people can’t even figure out exactly what year it was that the original Adventure was released, largely because a lot of people have just declared that it was released in a such-and-such year, without saying how they know this.

Certainly, I respect journalists as writers and thinkers, and I understand that in a popular magazine format it’s difficult to do the detailed citation of the sort that academic formats facilitate. Although I wrote in my usual and probably overly-snappy style, I tried to take pains to say that I’m not a magazine editor and not trying to dictate the way things are supposed to be in Topic. I can only speak from my own perspective, one that is biased to scholarly writing, as I mentioned. Still, I do wish that people writing about computing in all sorts of ways, not just scholars and journalists but even people writing for their own Web pages and contributing to Wikipedia, would make it easier for their readers to link back to sources of information and inspiring ideas.

It would be a great service (for parties interested in Mammoth Cave as well as those interested in the history of computing) if you did have Web footnotes, although I understand that adding post-publication citations and other apparatus is a pretty thankless task, one I’m not so eager to undertake myself. I would have had to correct one, if I’d put footnotes in my blog entry: I was mistaken about the Katie Hafner interview, which as you pointed out is not the one (whatever that one is) that is quoted in Dale Peterson’s 1983 book.

Second, let me note that sometime between now and when you posted the link to my essay, the folks at Topic magazine apparently decided to take their archives offline. I have hastily reposted the essay on my own site, here.

Third: WTF, dude? “Dibbell does mention Nelson and ‘The Craft of Adventure’”? Cut a brother some slack! I not only mention them, I begin the concluding section with two full paragraphs making it explicit that Nelson provided the conceit on which the essay rests. In the context of journalism, that’s hardly an afterthought, and it’s no less than what Nelson deserves.

That said, I don’t think it could have hurt to include footnotes, and now that I’m hosting the article on my own site, I may do just that. But keep in mind there’s a reason journalists get a wider audience than scholars, and a price we pay for it. In exchange for the freedom to write a quick, compelling read unencumbered by the machinery of scholarly reference and argument, nobody takes us especially seriously as thinkers. Your post, I guess, being a case in point.

PS: I guess you’re right that the phrase “As he later explained to an interviewer” might be taken to imply the interviewer was me. The confusion is an honest one, however. The quote in question does not in fact come from Hafner but from the Nelson DM4 you cite, which in turn cites it as “quoted in” a long-out-of-print book on computer games from 1983, so that the actual identity of the interviewer is pretty murky. I probably should have just left “to an interviewer” out. In journalistic convention, a phrase like “As he later explained” usually suffices to signal second-hand reporting.