Mark Williamson wrote:
What exactly do you mean by "permanently reserved"?
Is there some sort of binding legal document which says this? Or is it just a matter of "We could very well change it but we just don wanna"?
Mark
"Cool URIs don't change" by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading on this topic.
Which reminds me: it might be interesting to consider the use of some outside-the-web URI namespace in addition to Wikipedia URLs for truly persistent documents; for example, the doi: namespace, which identifies a specific thing, rather than where to find it, and may be more useful that URLs for serious long-term (> 100 years) references to objects. We already go some way towards doing this with article revision numbering, but the renderings of even fixed revisions of an article are still mutable, as images, templates, and software changes change under them.
To work properly, unlike the current scheme for revisions, a permanent version identifier for a truly persistent immutable document would need to capture the state of not only the wikitext of that article version, but the side-effects of context of the rendered page at the time of snapshot (template expansions, images, current software version and settings, user prefs etc.) at the moment of creation.
Clearly it is impractical, to say the least, to represent an article by a complete snapshot of an installation; however, all that is really needed is a snapshot of the complete rendered/renderable article including all content referenced. Perhaps a .tgz of an HTML+files tree of a rendered Wiki page, or an XML file containing all the necessary data including images etc., or a .pdf, might be a suitable format for capturing truly immutable snapshots of Wikipedia articles, with the DOI being based on a high-quality hash of the generated file content?
(See http://www.doi.org/handbook_2000/enumeration.html for more context.)
-- Neil