Please don't get me wrong. i am very much interested in supporting the
use of print sources on WP. I am after all a librarian trained in the
last decades of the print era, experienced at a library with
magnificent print resources, & I know the sources that only
antiquarian specialists will know 20 years from now.
There are many topics we can't cover otherwise. Most editors do not
have access to a good conventional library or are unwilling to use
one, but we do have many editors who can get even out of the way ones.
If there are enough people to work on a topic who can use the right
sources, we should use them.
The only ways of documenting something that was on the web but is no longer are:
1. finding a print equivalent
2. finding it in an internet archive
3. recording it yourself and having the file or the screenshots or the
printout.The print equivalent part is what lets us cite newspaper
articles not online. Keeping the old link commented out is useful,
because someone may be able to find it. That's why we add the full
reference, not just the link.
Any of these can also be forged or doctored or falsified, but AGF,
they are evidence.
But there's also
4. Trusting your memory and having other people confirm it. That may
be OK, sort of, but not if anyone really challenges it.
Print is fine. A book is fine because it is in a library catalog and
it is possible for someone else to read it and confirm. A quote from a
book of which all copies have mysteriously disappeared is not fine. A
dead website is not like an out of print book; it's like a book of
which all copies have disappeared. If you haven't kept photocopies or
notes, you can't even check your own memory of what it said.
Video is fine, if it's recent, because it is documented, and the files
are in principle available. What I remember from my early childhood as
being on Howdy Doody but which didn't get kinescoped is not fine.
(This is actually a good example because the WP web site for the show
is now a dead link. But archives of the shows exist. The facts in the
[[Howdy Doody]] article are not documented in any detail. But the WP
article stands because anybody who knows enough about it to challenge
it knows that recordings and descriptions do exist.)
Non existent references are like unsourced assertions. In a normal
condition, yes, you can make assertions and if they are reasonable
nobody objects. But this discussion was about a sharply challenged
article. If you're challenged in good faith, you have to prove what
you say.
DGG
On 5/15/07, Gallagher Mark George <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
G'day John,
Since when have we banned the use of online
subscription news-
sites as
references, or made it policy that dead links cannot be cited as
sources?The latter plainly contradicts [[WP:CS]], and a brief
overview of the
relevant WP pages reveals no overt ban on citations from
subscription sites,
but I just found out that somebody pulled out a bunch of such
references: <
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ketuanan_Melayu&diff=13029126…
>
That is incredibly stupid, just removing references willy-nilly. Possibly the editor in
this case attempted to find a Google Cache (temporary, but better than nothing) or Wayback
Machine copy of the referenced document, but I doubt it. Did he also go through Google,
news libraries, his own personal reference library, etc., to find replacements, or leave
that up to you?
I was bold and reverted, but I would like to know
if I didn't get
the memo
or if I've always been misunderstanding how we do things.
Well, as far as subscription news sites are concerned, I don't see that as any
different from citing newspaper articles published before the advent of the Web. If I use
a modern-day news story, I'll cite it the same as a dead tree newspaper article ---
the link is included as a courtesy. If someone found that the /Canberra Times/ (or
whoever) had hidden the article behind a login screen, or had removed it altogether, I
certainly wouldn't expect the reference to be removed. It would still be a valid
reference, even if the link wasn't there.
You may as well remove citations of books because they can't be read online. Or of
documentaries, because the film was pulled from YouTube.
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]
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