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

[Brian]

It's hard to imagine someone thinking "I bet no one will notice if I just
paste in this paragraph from a Wikipedia article." At the same time, some
users, perhaps even some apparently sophisticated users, may misunderstand
just what exactly is meant by "free encyclopedia." And not to his credit
directly, but certainly somewhat in his favor, it is simply not possible to
cite an article such that you refer to it exactly the way it looked on a
particular day. This is because there is no software that can use the
revision number to pull in the correct revision of templates etc.

There really isn't any excuse though. A URL suitable for use in a book can
be as short as Wikipedia.org/Article (you're redirected to the article after
5 seconds). That's really, minimal attribution - who wouldn't be able to
agree on that??:)

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 4:53 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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