On Thursday 31 October 2002 04:31 pm, Koyaanisqatsi wrote:
Ortolan88 wrote:
We have no guarantee that the entries will remain
the same either.
The bioastropedia is an excellent web site, but we aren't going to
import their articles wholesale and leave them untouched forever, are
we?
Well, no, I didn't expect us to. I guess the question is "at what point
have articles changed enough from the source that it's ok to remove the
citation"? I would (today, anyway) urge people to leave the citations in
and change "works cited" to "works consulted"--if for no other reason
than
that several notable academics have been caught plagiarizing lately.
General statement:
What really is so wrong with giving this attribution information in the edit
summary that actually adds the info to the page? That way we know for sure
just what the attribution is for and somebody can hit the 'cur' link to find
out just how much has changed since that text was added.
We could have another check box for saving edits stating 'major edit',
'attributed source' or something else that would highlight that edit in the
article's history. We could also allow URLs placed in these edit summaries to
work - thus we have a link-back.
In a longish article having attributions in the article text could become
unwieldy and ugly - thus prompting the natural wiki habit of taking-out the
ugliness by removing the attributions. We already have a mechanism for
attributing work and we should use this in these cases.
I don't think we should be giving special treatment to externally generated
text by allowing those attributions in the article text when we don't allow
Wikipedia users to similarly attribute their own work. The history is for
logging attribution metadata, no? So then let's use it.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)