On 7/9/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/9/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/9/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
And if you want to say "blog X said Y", then of course "blog X" is an excellent source for that. The question in both cases is more one of notability and relevance than one of reliability. What needs to stop is the blind worshipping of printed paper.
One problem with citing "blog X" when saying that "blog X said Y" is that the blog might very well not exist in a few years. A copy of a New York Times story, on the other hand, will certainly exist for many years.
And it is *exactly* transience problems like this that show that we need to be working more closely with the Internet Archive people (more closely that is than simply letting ourselves be spidered by 'em and letting'em d/l database dumps); I've suggested several times that when a valid ext. link is submitted, it be discreetly tagged with an IA link (assuming it exists), somewhat like how we're *supposed* to be validating ISBN links (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2391; I really wonder about this bug- it should be pretty simple and useful, but you know the devs... got other fish to fry). Or at least a robot to go around adding links (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1500288&gro...) if the original is gone.
I agree that this would be useful, to the extent it's possible ("there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine"). Also, since IA can and will remove pages from the archive under certain circumstances (one of which is when a robots.txt file appears later), you still have to worry about an archive disappearing later.
And of course this doesn't at all address the issue of original research - rather than proving something by referencing original sources Wikipedia generally (if not exclusively) should be referencing facts which have already been analysed by experts in that field.
Referencing in Wikipedia is currently a big mess. The incremental tweaks seem to be making things worse in many ways.
Anthony