I am unfamiliar with etiquette for citing electronically-obtained data. I wonder if this is true. I'd be surprised if it made no difference. It seems that there is no consensus in the linguistic community on what prescriptivism is, but I am particularly intrigued by language standardization, which is surely a natural phenomenon in linguistic communities. Those who prescribe language standards can have some goofy reasoning behind their prescriptions, but it is certainly easy to see why linguists must be descriptivists and school teachers must prescribe language standards.
Linguists have an obligation to be objective in their study of language.
School teachers have an obligation to prepare their students for participation in a society that judges linguistic behavior. As a linguist, I have no trouble pointing out the irrationality of linguistic prejudice or the silliness of some linguistic prescriptions. I do have a problem with the prescription that linguistic communities ought not to prescribe. I believe that linguists can and should play constructive roles in the prescriptivist debates that all language communities engage in. One of the things that I do nowadays is help the aerospace industry manage a linguistic standard for writing aircraft maintenance procedures.