It's not that nobody
knows how to cite it, it's that nobody
wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige.
I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit.
Reviewers don't take anyone to task for it, because they do that too.
For a while, there was a collection of multilingual word counts over OpenSubtitles that everyone was using, and you would acquire it from the OneDrive of the pseudonymous blogger "Hermit Dave". Many people put the link to his blog in a footnote, but I think I was the only person to come up with a citation for (Dave 2011).
People don't even cite Google Books Ngrams and that's got a real paper [1].
[1] Lin, Y., Michel, J.-B., Aiden, E. L., Orwant, J., Brockman, W., and Petrov, S. (2012). Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations, 169-174.
I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit.
Reviewers don't take anyone to task for it, because they do that too.
For a while, there was a collection of multilingual word counts over OpenSubtitles that everyone was using, and you would acquire it from the OneDrive of the pseudonymous blogger "Hermit Dave". Many people put the link to his blog in a footnote, but I think I was the only person to come up with a citation for (Dave 2011).
People don't even cite Google Books Ngrams and that's got a real paper [1].
[1] Lin, Y., Michel, J.-B., Aiden, E. L., Orwant, J., Brockman, W., and Petrov, S. (2012). Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations, 169-174.