A splendid idea for Internet-based research in general, and it's surprising how few people do this (myself included, I admit).
In terms of Wikipedia sourcing, however, it may create (or overlook) a problem: verifiability. What is the purpose, for Wikipedia, of doing so?
Is the purpose to be able to say, at some later date, "oh, that page must've been deleted. Want me to email you a copy of the original?" If so, is that verifiable? I don't think so - it may be impossible to contact you, for example. So how do Wikipedia readers benefit?
On the other hand, if the page concerned contained quotations or cited other sources that may help in locating a *different* source, then it is certainly helpful, albeit indirectly.
My concern is that encouraging saving of pages - however unofficially - may be seen to imply the former, perhaps undermining vital policies. But this may be avoidable.
Jake
On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 16:09 -0500, James Hare wrote:
I have an idea.
How about, from now on, every time any of us uses a web source, we save the page so that it'll be around in the future? Not necessarily making this a policy, or a guideline, but a Really Good Idea.
Once it goes off the Internet, we will still have it for at least our own use.
Or how about a Library of Congress-esque things for websites, where identified websites are selectively archived so they can exist for eternity (as opposed to Wayback Machine which seems to work as randomly picking pages).
On 1/2/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Problem is their lag time. It takes over 6 months for stuff to appear there by which time you are in deep trouble if it wasn't stored to begin with. It would be nice if every site that's referenced in Wikipedia is spidered automatically just like every site that's visited by a surfer with an Alexa toolbar.
Mgm
On 1/2/07, Jake Waskett jake@waskett.org wrote:
There might be some copyright problems involved with that proposal.
There is a partial solution, however. The Wayback Machine [http://www.archive.org/index.php] archives many web pages and their revisions. They have negotiates an exemption to the DMCA [http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=82097], and so will probably be around for some time to come.
Jake
On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 05:33 -0800, zero 0000 wrote:
We allow web pages as sources under some reliability criteria, even though the web page might change or go away. We choose to live with this problem as a lesser evil than banning web sources altogether. But, I was wondering: could Wikipedia not keep its own archive of web pages used as sources? Or some such web pages? This is a minimally thought out proposal as you can tell!
Zero.
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