Does it make sense to put a hyperlink into an answer within an interview?
Some media did an interview with me and published it - and I see a hyperlink inserted into my answer. I provided them the link separately but didn't expect to see it inside the quotation marks. What should I do? Is it really as much nonsense as it seems to me? Thanks for your reply. (Sorry for my poor English...)
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1 answer
The only stylistic problem is that a quote is supposed to be an exact reproduction of something that has been said or written by someone. If you look at academic writing for example it would be unforgivable to add a hyperlink to a quote that wasn't there before without explicitly marking the hyperlink as an addition.
If you are bothered by this practice I would recommend the same thing ggiaquin mentioned: contact the journalist and politely ask him about the reasoning for doing this.
Most likely it was easier for potential readers to just incorporate the link into a place that fits instead of adding a few sentences that would explain why the hyperlink is related.
In general I would advise against this practice. Quotes are not supposed to be altered. Even if you mentioned something in the context of the quotation that could be linked, for example by adding a few sentences that were too long for the printed article or you referred to the linked source yourself, that should be marked visuably. For example a journalist could do something like the following:
"And then I did this stuff. [The source our guest speaker mentioned.]"
And then format the sentence in brackets to be a link. This way it's obvious which part was what you said and which part was added by the journalist.
On the other hand if the journalist was only summarizing and paraphrasing what you said it would be perfectly normal to add links to the text, as was explained by ggiaquin in the answer I linked above in the same way.
As long as you don't feel the link did massively change the meaning of what you said, for example by providing a link to Wikipedia for a difficult technical term you used or something like that, I wouldn't be too concerned. But when dealing with this journalist again you might request that citations are not altered with links if it makes you uncomfortable. Just mention that this has happened before at an interview and that you thought it was a bit weird, they will understand and find other ways. Adding a link to the sentence before or after the quote is not a big problem.
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