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

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Joseph Reagle<reagle at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday 25 June 2009, Angela wrote:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=6042007 also works. For book purposes,
>> this is already shorter than most URLs, so shouldn't need to be
>> shortened anymore which would remove information about where the link
>> goes.
>
> I did not know that, that's great.

Perhaps this could be included as an output format under "cite this
page"? Provide the full permanent URL, then the short version for
citation purposes.

As an aside, what bugs me the most about this is that according to the
note reproduced in this story:
http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/
Anderson said that "All those are my screwups after we decided not to
run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation
format for web sources…"

We give people a lovely pre-made citation on each and every page!
Every major style manual includes explicit directions on how to cite
websites! Every academic paper ever published about Wikipedia has
grappled with this problem and come up with some sort of solution!
Sheesh.

-- Phoebe