The second sentence of your third paragraph negates the objection that forms your second paragraph. List the web source for your citation, whether it be JSTOR or a university database. These things are not merely repositories, as libraries are, but publishers, and the possibility of variance is the main reason they must be considered so.
With that information given in the bib ref ("JSTOR, Web, [date]"), a full URL is unnecessary to know which of them is meant, and this information may be clearer, in fact, than a long string of httpese. I even know databases which, while they have specific (and very long) URLs for the articles they contain, if you copy and paste that URL into a browser afresh, the site dumps you back to the main search page, so the URL did you no help and only wasted your time.
As for your final paragraph, see, again, the last sentence quoted from the MLA rules.
The only other advantage I can see for quoting a URL from fugitive fan sites is that, if they disappear, archive.org requires a URL to search for them.
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Date: 2013-10-16 02:03 pm (UTC)With that information given in the bib ref ("JSTOR, Web, [date]"), a full URL is unnecessary to know which of them is meant, and this information may be clearer, in fact, than a long string of httpese. I even know databases which, while they have specific (and very long) URLs for the articles they contain, if you copy and paste that URL into a browser afresh, the site dumps you back to the main search page, so the URL did you no help and only wasted your time.
As for your final paragraph, see, again, the last sentence quoted from the MLA rules.
The only other advantage I can see for quoting a URL from fugitive fan sites is that, if they disappear, archive.org requires a URL to search for them.