At 06:57 PM 4/17/02 +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
I think we should avoid storing *any* texts like these, including the "Origin of Species" book which is still online at the pedia (and I say so even though I am a biologist! ;)
Actually, I've already removed Origin of Species from wikipedia. :) There's a link to it elsewhere on the web on that page now, along with whatever discussion there was of the book itself.
Personally, I'm against the inclusion of even relatively small source texts in Wikipedia. I've put my reasons in a variety of talk pages, you can find links to most of them from http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Talk%3AYes%2C_Virginia%2C_there_is_a_Santa_Cla... but the basic summary of my position is that we shouldn't be attributing world-editable text to other people. For an ordinary Wikipedia article, there's an implicit "The various random yahoos who edit Wikipedia say" at the beginning, whereas at the beginning of (for example) A Modest Proposal there's an explicit "Jonathan Swift himself, and Jonathan Swift alone, said." It's a lot worse if the latter gets modified than the former, since for the former it's expected as a normal part of how Wikipedia works but for the latter it turns the article into an outright lie.
Copied from the talk page in question, under the GFDL. :)
-- "Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"