On 03/05/07, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
Can we write the article without publishing the string? Sure. So why do we have to do it, and potentially expose ourselves to liability? If there's a way to do it, with no loss of academic integrity, why the heck wouldn't we?
Well, it's pretty clearly a loss of academic integrity.
Would [[Illegal prime]] lose by not having the allegedly illegal number quoted? Hell yeah.
See the snippet of L. Ron Hubbard's handwriting in [[Xenu]]? That's my personal favourite piece of fair use on Wikipedia (yes, I put it there). Could the article be written without it? Of course. Would it lose something important? Hell yeah.
I expect we can put the number into the article that already exists. I doubt doing it today will stick. I'm just glad we don't have to have Wikipedia perfect on a second-by-second basis. Immediatism really gets in the way of writing the encyclopedia.
- d.