On 7/9/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org>
wrote:
On 7/9/06, Erik Moeller
<eloquence(a)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&gr…)
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
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