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

[wjhonson at aol.com]

I want to remind everything that the issue as to why the URL's weren't 
included *supposedly* wasn't that the standard URL is too long, but 
rather just that one side wanted the "timestamp" as they say, and the 
other didn't.  Personally it sounds to me like they are completely 
fudging the situation.  That's just my opinion and you can't sue me 
over it :)

I really doubt that any reader (whatsoever) is going to laboriously 
type in the oldid in the first place to see that article "as it was" 
when it was quoted.  We can hardly even get anyone to cite to the 
historical articles in the first place or they do something weird like 
say "accessed on..." which doesn't do anything automagically anyway.

Any factoid worth quoting off-project is probably ref'fed anyway, and 
the full cite should include the underlying source as well making a 
cite to the historical version redundant it would seem to me.

That brings up another thing in my mind.  The ability to search the 
history of one article *solely*, or one single talk page history.  Can 
we do that?

Will