On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:23 +0000, wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote: I, for one, would say that yoy should just do what you would do with offline sources, there is no reason to treat online sources in a different way: when you cite a journal it is the reader's responsibility to go and find it in a library, not yours, as long as you give all necessary information to locate a copy of the journal if one exists at all, and if the journal goes out of print and all libraries of the world somehow decide to burn all copies of that journal then it is still not your responsibility, as an author or editor. A dead link is like a book which is out of print. It is hard to find, but it was published someday, so it is appropriate to cite it as long as you include the access date (a short quotation would help too). Your responsibility as an author is to provide proper references that would enable one to spot the source if copies exist and to provide the information in a correct manner (eg if the source says "a bit of it" don't write "lots of it"). For links, as long as you cite the pages for information that is correct and truthful and you provide proper citations (URL, access date, etc) then you have done what is expected of you. Noting that a link is dead or providing a link to a web archiver is a good thing, too. There are some systems where you can go and keep a snapshot of a webpage for future reference. Using them is a good thing, but not necessary: when you reference a book you don't make a snapshot of it, so you shouldn't be required to take snapshots of webpages just because webpages may go dead (books can be burned or become out of print, too). However, do note that placing citations to dead webpages, or to live webpages that soon afterwards go dead, is a way to commit undetectable vandalism. There is no easy solution against this, unless one is willing to not include any dead links. Furthermore, the responsibilities of the author have to be balanced with the rights of the reader: the reader has a right to be able to check your work for accuracy, and citations are supposed to satisfy that right, but with the web this system appears to be broken now (with books and journals it was very unlikely for a paper source to disappear from all over the world and from all libraries at once), so one could say that dead links do not appear to be very useful for readers, particularly those not familiar with citation systems. While the author has a responsibility to provide sources and assist one in finding them by providing proper publication and access dates or other information, they are not responsible for actually keeping a copy of them or of actually finding them themselves after an article is written, but the reader has a right to be able to check the author's accuracy and therefore the volatility of the web appears to be a diservice to readers. Perhaps the best solution would be to build a web archiving platform in Wikipedia itself, so that all referenced webpages are stored for later retrieval. -- Thanks, NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/