[WikiEN-l] Gosh darn it, those spammers^Wmarketers will show us what for

[Bryan Derksen]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> Have a look at [[Club skifield]] (which I wrote). Follow the external
> link. Is it really worth our (my) while attempting to write something
> that surpasses the link in terms of quality, depth, comprehensiveness
> of coverage? Practically speaking, who is going to be reading
> Wikipedia that doesn't have access to the net, but needs that
> information?

The external link in question is:
http://forum.ski.com.au/scripts/ultimatebboard/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=004535;p=0#000000

It leads to a post on a web-based forum. That's potentially pretty
ephemeral, isn't it? What happens if the site goes down, the forum gets
discontinued, they change forum software and the old posts aren't
compatible, or they simply decide to prune old posts to "save space"?
The post is copyrighted and not under a free licence, so an interested
party can't just save a copy and post it somewhere else if that happens.

Also, what happens if the information in that post turns out to have an
error, or becomes obsolete with time? There's no way to update it. It
was written by someone who claims the title "Broken River Advocate", and
I presume "Broken River" is the name of some ski facility somewhere.
What if the post is POV?

So even assuming everyone reading Wikipedia's contents has full live
access to the rest of the web (an assumption Rich Holton questioned in
another post), there's still a major benefit in bringing this
information into Wikipedia's database and under Wikipedia's free licence.