From: Erik Moeller
It's not so much an Internet/paper distinction but a primary/secondary sources distinction. Errors being promulgated from one book to the
next
happens on paper just as it happens online. A personal webpage may
well be
a much better source for vital data than a biography written by a
third
party, and that in turn may be a better source than a book that
briefly
mentions the person in context.
That reminds me...can we add a little <permanent URL for this version> at the bottom of the article pages?
We can find the link to the archived copy of previous versions, but there's presently no way to make a hard link to the presently displayed version.
That would be a very simple step in making Wikipedia usable as an "authoritative" resource, for one thing.
It's also helpful for internal discussions if you want to have a discussion comparing different versions of the same entry.
--tc
The Cunctator wrote:
That reminds me...can we add a little <permanent URL for this version> at the bottom of the article pages?
We can find the link to the archived copy of previous versions, but there's presently no way to make a hard link to the presently displayed version.
That would be a very simple step in making Wikipedia usable as an "authoritative" resource, for one thing.
It's also helpful for internal discussions if you want to have a discussion comparing different versions of the same entry.
Yes, this would be very helpful! I've actually before gone in and made zero-edits (rearrange whitespace or something) so that the "current" version gets bumped into the history and I can refer to it specifically in a talk-page discussion (as in "at least in the current version [1], there is odd wording in the 3rd paragraph"). Would be much more direct if the current version also was referenceable by a revision-number.
-Mark
Cunc-
That reminds me...can we add a little <permanent URL for this version> at the bottom of the article pages?
Yeah, I wanted to add this but it's a bit tricky with the current CUR/OLD setup so I might hold off until Brion reorganizes the DB, if he does. One thing that I also think might be useful for the certification process is to have some kind of flag that can be assigned to certain revisions to mark them as stable, only by sysops (I probably shouldn't say this when responding to Cunc ;).
Then you could have a special syntax that would always refer to the flagged revision, like this: [[Caesar+]], pointing to the flagged revision of [[Caesar]], or the top one if there is none. These would be assigned after the certification process in community consensus, of course.
Advantage: Makes refreshing articles in BP much easier and allows pointing to stable versions in any other context.
Regards,
Erik
"EM" == Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de writes:
EM> One thing that I also think might be useful for the EM> certification process is to have some kind of flag that can be EM> assigned to certain revisions to mark them as stable, only by EM> sysops (...)
How about [[status=stable]]?
~ESP
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