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@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=130291263...
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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