Folks,
Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking
dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
Thanks,
Marc Riddell
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_Wall we had a complete list
of cars which appear on the BBC Top Gear "Cool Wall". I removed this
as being almost certainly a violation of copyright. It is now being
argued that reproducing the list in full does not violate copyright,
because it is not published in the show's magazine or on the website
and has been compiled by collating the lists from numerous shows. It
is further asserted that compiling the list from these shows does not
constitute original research, although there is no known reliable
secondary source for any of the data, let alone the complete collated
list
Original research? You decide.
Copyright? I think so, but what do I know?
Fancruft? Ooooh, tricky :-)
Guidance appreciated.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
The other day I noticed an editor replacing multiple references to a website
that has disappeared with {{fact}}, in different articles.
The other day I noticed an editor removing a number of references to a
website, with a "this site is gone" edit summary. The site has indeed left
the building, so to speak, but I'm not sure what the rule is here.
Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is (with a
note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or
replace the links with archive.org links?
In these particular instances the links were replaced by {{fact}}, which
is--to my mind--the worst of all options: it makes it look as if there never
were proper sources for the statement, or actually worse: the "citation
needed" make it look as if the statements are somehow controversial. Not to
mention that they now run the risk of being deleted.
(The issue that made me think about this is clouded by the fact that the
editor effectively removing the sources deems the originally referenced site
untrustworthy, but that's beside the larger point, really.)
Michel Vuijlsteke
On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:23 +0000, wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
> From: Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>
> multiple references to a website
> that has disappeared
> Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is
> (with a
> note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or
> replace the links with archive.org links?
I, for one, would say that yoy should just do what you would do with
offline sources, there is no reason to treat online sources in a
different way: when you cite a journal it is the reader's responsibility
to go and find it in a library, not yours, as long as you give all
necessary information to locate a copy of the journal if one exists at
all, and if the journal goes out of print and all libraries of the world
somehow decide to burn all copies of that journal then it is still not
your responsibility, as an author or editor.
A dead link is like a book which is out of print. It is hard to find,
but it was published someday, so it is appropriate to cite it as long as
you include the access date (a short quotation would help too).
Your responsibility as an author is to provide proper references that
would enable one to spot the source if copies exist and to provide the
information in a correct manner (eg if the source says "a bit of it"
don't write "lots of it"). For links, as long as you cite the pages for
information that is correct and truthful and you provide proper
citations (URL, access date, etc) then you have done what is expected of
you. Noting that a link is dead or providing a link to a web archiver
is a good thing, too.
There are some systems where you can go and keep a snapshot of a webpage
for future reference. Using them is a good thing, but not necessary:
when you reference a book you don't make a snapshot of it, so you
shouldn't be required to take snapshots of webpages just because
webpages may go dead (books can be burned or become out of print, too).
However, do note that placing citations to dead webpages, or to live
webpages that soon afterwards go dead, is a way to commit undetectable
vandalism. There is no easy solution against this, unless one is
willing to not include any dead links.
Furthermore, the responsibilities of the author have to be balanced with
the rights of the reader: the reader has a right to be able to check
your work for accuracy, and citations are supposed to satisfy that
right, but with the web this system appears to be broken now (with books
and journals it was very unlikely for a paper source to disappear from
all over the world and from all libraries at once), so one could say
that dead links do not appear to be very useful for readers,
particularly those not familiar with citation systems. While the author
has a responsibility to provide sources and assist one in finding them
by providing proper publication and access dates or other information,
they are not responsible for actually keeping a copy of them or of
actually finding them themselves after an article is written, but the
reader has a right to be able to check the author's accuracy and
therefore the volatility of the web appears to be a diservice to
readers.
Perhaps the best solution would be to build a web archiving platform in
Wikipedia itself, so that all referenced webpages are stored for later
retrieval.
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
I just encountered, on the article [[House (TV series)]], that citation #3
is actually just a link to [[Words and Deeds (House)]]. Can a article really
cite another article or should that citation be removed? Seems a little
squirrely to me.
Angela
--
Wikipedia:[[User:Psu256]]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Stojnic <rainmansr(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2008/10/31
Subject: [Wikitech-l] en.wiki migrated to new search backend
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi all,
We now have english wikipedia fully migrated to new servers / new search
backend. We cannot fully migrate other wikis until we resolve some hardware
issues. In the meantime, here is the overview of new features now deployed
on en.wiki:
1) Did you mean... - we now have search suggestions. Care has been taken to
provide suggestions that are context-sensitive, i.e. on phrases, proper
names, etc..
2) fuzzy and wildcard queries - a word can be made fuzzy by adding ~ to it's
end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different spellings and
similar names to sarah thompson. Wildcards can now be prefix and suffix,
e.g. *stan will give various countries in central asia.
3) prefix: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to pages
beginning with certain prefix. E.g.
mwsuggest prefix:Wikipedia:Village Pump
will search all village pumps and archives for mwsuggest. This should be
especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or
searchbox
4) intitle: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to titles only
5) generally improved quality of search results via usage of related
articles (based on co-occurrence of links), anchor text, text abstracts,
proximity within articles, sections, redirects, improved stemming and such
Cheers, Robert
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
In a message dated 10/30/2008 3:33:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
arromdee(a)rahul.net writes:
He was a relatively minor figure, making a statement about
himself which was neither overly promotional nor overly damaging. Someone
in that situation is far more likely to be real than fake.
And he was complaining about something which, by our own rules, doesn't
require that the complaint comes from the subject anyway.>>
---------------------
And I already stated how I would have dealt with it, and you've already
stated how you would have dealt with it. It's time to move on I think.
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In a message dated 10/30/2008 11:34:26 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
arromdee(a)rahul.net writes:
We knew
who he was by any reasonable standards,>>
-----------------
{{fact}}
I don't know why you would trust anyone who said "I'm so-and-so".
Many times I've had people say this when it's not true.
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In a message dated 10/30/2008 11:34:26 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
arromdee(a)rahul.net writes:
The normal course of action is to delete the statement, at least if it's a
sincere complaint.>>
--------------------------
That's *your* course of action Ken and no one is stopping you.
Go do it.
It's not *my* course of action, and no one is going to make me do it :)
Can we move on now?
Or are you practicing ?
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