[WikiEN-l] NY Times: Wired Editor Apologizes for Copying from Wikipedia in New Book

[Andrew Gray]

2009/6/25 Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu>:

> Option 2 is more readable, but requires a redirection by the reader if they
> want full bibliographic detail, and adds pages (and weight and cost) to a
> book. Another option is to use an adaptation of Option 1: standard
> long-then-short Chicago without URLs, which are provided online. This make
> a practical sort of sense (and this is what Anderson *says* he was planning
> to do), but is non-standard and I'm not sure how it would be received.

This reminds me of a thought I've been having for a while. *We* can
pro-actively take steps to make citation easier for our users, at
least in theory; we can provide more elegant URLs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&oldid=6042007

can be rendered as

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=6042007

Can we make that even more succinct? Well, we could take a leaf from
the DOI playbook, and set up something like:

http://[site]/wp:en/6042007

At first glance, this doesn't seem to actually add very much - it's
just a shorter URL. But we could then use it as a platform to help our
reusers...

a) if that revision is deleted, we could generate a page saying so and
identifying the next live revision *on that page*.

b) if one day we get a marvellous system for identifying authors, this
would be an obvious place to display the generated list of them for a
given revision.

I'd be curious as to any other applications people can think of.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk