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

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:10 AM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> 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.

<snip>

This is indeed a problem. I've sometimes gone to an old version of a
page and thought "this looks wrong", and then realised that the
templates I'm seeing are the current ones, not the old ones (the same
applies when an image has been overwritten or deleted and recreated).
Sometimes a screenshot or true archive version is needed as well. As
for software to detect "dynamic" parts of the page and to go and grab
(even from deleted revisions) the older version of that dynamic
element, surely *someone* can do that? On the other hand, the bit
about the older dynamic parts of the page having been deleted is a
real problem as well.

Imagine an old citation leading to a page version that somehow shows a
shock image. Some of our more creative vandals would have little
problem doing that, especially if the deleted page or template no
longer existed, or something clever was done with template coding.

Ultimately, if a page relies heavily on templates or images, a
screenshot or *real* permanent link is needed.

Carcharoth