Bartending/Information from Web sites

There are many Web sites about bartending and especially mixed drinks. Although much good information is on the Internet, a large grain of salt must be taken when it comes to recipes, especially cocktails.

Many Web sites such as iDrink, BarMeister, and DrinkMixer accept user submissions for drinks. With this being the case, as with most recipes, users submit whatever they feel is their way of making the drink. What this means is that the information is commonly wrong, being invented by the user. This occurs for various reasons; either the user has no idea what he's talking about, or has put his own 'spin' on a drink.

For quality assurance reasons, the WikiBook on Bartending tries to cite research from reputable sources very blatantly. Reputable sources may include The Official Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course, Mr. Boston, The Playboy Bartender's Guide (Deluxe Edition), or others. Sections and pages may be headed with such citations, as this pragraph is. Notice that both the name of the book, including its release edition, and the ISBN of the book are given. The ISBN can be used to find the book on sites such as Amazon, or to have your local bookstore order it.

By contrast, Web sources are lumped together and warned about as a whole. Above is shown a Web source warning box. All such warning boxes lead back to this page.

Finally, sometimes field research is used in the WikiBook. Bartenders with first-hand experience may write or contribute to various sections of the WikiBook; or field researchers may explore bars and collect input from interviews with bartenders. In this case, the information is much more trustworthy than a Web site, but still should be duly noted to have come from a human source. In these cases, the field research tag above is used. If no citation is given, then it can be assumed that the text is exclusively field research and collected knowledge; no Web sources are used, and the information comes from prior experience and possibly previously read literature that is not cited.

In some cases, a combination of research materials may be used. For these cases, before the first paragraph containing such information, a combination of tags will be used. This is shown above.

It should also be noted that these tags lose their meaning at the beginning of any new section. The exception of this is when these tags appear at the TOP of the page; if they are at the top, it means the entire entry is based by default on the cited source primarily.