Subject: Wikipedia (was: Re: Clarification for Copyright to referred material in IETF draft)

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:24:34 -0700

SM <sm at resistor dot net> wrote:

> Quoting Doug Ewell [1]:
> 
>    "I thought it would be good to let the list know that these
>     misconceptions exist and may be widespread, because of the wide
>     use of Wikipedia"

I like Wikipedia and usually find its articles to be accurate.  The
article on BCP 47 language tags to which I was referring happened to be
filled with errors and oversimplifications.  (Its author was, and is,
known to make the same blunders on mailing lists.)

It would be a mistake to assume that all Wikipedia articles are either
100% accurate or 100% inaccurate.  Cross-checking with other sources is
often a wise move.  This is also true for books, magazines, technical
journals, mailing lists, and blogs.  I've even read standards and
specifications that contained factual errors; I suppose we all have.

The fact that Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone, and do not
undergo a formal peer review process by people with abbreviations at the
end of their names, does not automatically mean they are chock-full of
damaging errors.  Civilians with better information fix problems all the
time.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:27:37 -0500

> known to make the same blunders on mailing lists.)

The problem I have with this is not the content (presumably the author of the I-D is vouching for any references they use), it's
that the content can change at any time.

Regards
Marshall

> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

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From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:10:50 -0500

> that the content can change at any time.

The problem with referencing *any* web page, whether it's Wikipedia or 
otherwise, is that the content can change at any time. So you not only 
need spatial coordinates (the URL), but also the temporal coordinates 
(date and time) for *when* the pertinent data was accessed and found to 
be on that web page.

Interestingly enough, the "rules" for external references in Wikipedia 
also require the temporal coordinates to be recorded. And for Wikipedia 
itself, for any given date and time you can always pull up in the 
history what the page had on it right then.

     Tony Hansen
     [email-masked]

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From: Robert Brockway <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:07:30 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 14 Dec 2010, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> The problem I have with this is not the content (presumably the author 
> of the I-D is vouching for any references they use), it's that the 
> content can change at any time.

Hi Marshall.  Mediawiki (the software behind Wikipedia and a lot of other 
sites) solved this problem years ago.  It is possible to link to a 
specific version of any article on a Mediawiki site.  Just look for the 
'Permanent link' link on the page.

In my experience very few sites linking to Wikipedia use this capability, 
proably because they don't know about it.  Ideally anyone linking to 
Wikipedia from an article would link to the specific version so that the 
reader sees exactly what the author saw when they wrote the article.

More recent versions of Mediawiki advise that the copy of the page is old 
and provide a link to the latest version.  That's fine too.

Eg, here is a link to a version of the IETF article from yesterday:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internet_Engineering_Task_Force&oldid=390092590

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: [email-masked]		Linux counter ID #16440
IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode)
Web: http://www.practicalsysadmin.com
Contributing member of Software in the Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org/)
Open Source: The revolution that silently changed the world

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:02:36 -0500

On Dec 14, 2010, at 6:07 PM, Robert Brockway wrote:

>> The problem I have with this is not the content (presumably the author of the I-D is vouching for any references they use), it's that the content can change at any time.
> 
> Hi Marshall.  Mediawiki (the software behind Wikipedia and a lot of other sites) solved this problem years ago.  It is possible to link to a specific version of any article on a Mediawiki site.  Just look for the 'Permanent link' link on the page.
> 
> In my experience very few sites linking to Wikipedia use this capability, proably because they don't know about it.  Ideally anyone linking to Wikipedia from an article would link to the specific version so that the reader sees exactly what the author saw when they wrote the article.
> 
> More recent versions of Mediawiki advise that the copy of the page is old and provide a link to the latest version.  That's fine too.
> 

Then (although this is the IESG's call and this is just my opinion), I think that the IETF should require this usage in anything published. 

Regards
Marshall

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From: Florian Weimer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:37:58 +0000

* Marshall Eubanks:

> The problem I have with this is not the content (presumably the
> author of the I-D is vouching for any references they use), it's

I think that's why you're supposed to add a retrieved date to your
citation.

-- 
Florian Weimer                <[email-masked]>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
Kriegsstraße 100              tel: +49-721-96201-1
D-76133 Karlsruhe             fax: +49-721-96201-99

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From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:24:21 +0100

On 15/Dec/10 03:02, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> Then (although this is the IESG's call and this is just my
> opinion), I think that the IETF should require this usage in
> anything published.

IMHO, whether to use temporal coordinates (where available) should be
left to authors' judgment.  Some authors diligently monitor the
relevant Wikipedia pages.

For symmetric citations, I'd note that Mediawiki recognizes inline
references to RFCs[1] and that Wikipedia has a "Cite IETF"[2] template.

There seems to be room for tighter cooperation...

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:RFC
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_IETF

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:37:06 -0500

> relevant Wikipedia pages.

It makes no difference whether authors monitor the relevant Wikipedia
pages, because you can't update the references section of the RFC once
it's published.

I find it slightly astonishing that the RFC Editor's instuctions on
URLs don't require a visited-on parameter.  Just about every academic
style guide requires such a note for the obvious reason that the
target of a URL can change.  The whole reason we have the citation
traditions we do is so that someone can follow the reference later and
look up the material in question.  This is an important feature of any
reference, because without it the citation is all but worthless: it
does nobody any good if you include a citation and then nobody can
check whether you understood (or even quoted) the material correctly.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

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From: "Worley, Dale R (Dale)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:43:31 -0500

________________________________________
From: [email-masked] [[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan [[email-masked]]

target of a URL can change.

I see this in the 22 Sep 2009 draft of the instructions:

      The use of URLs in references in RFCs is generally discouraged,
      because URLs are often not stable.  On the other hand, there are
      cases where a URL is demonstrably the most stable reference
      available for some reference.

and

   URLs and DNS names in RFCs

      The use of URLs in RFCs is discouraged, because many URLs are not
      stable references.  Exceptions may be made for normative
      references in those cases where the URL is demonstrably the most
      stable reference available.  References to long-lived files on
      ietf.org and rfc-editor.org are generally acceptable.

Given that, I would expect that a URL that is "demonstrably the most stable reference available" would suggest that the contents of the URL at any date near the publication date of the RFC "should" yield the same contents.  If an RFC references a URL that is unstable enough for us to notice and complain about it, the URL should not have been used in the first place.

Dale

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:01:06 -0500

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 11:43:31AM -0500, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote:
> Given that, I would expect that a URL that is "demonstrably the most
> stable reference available" would suggest that the contents of the
> URL at any date near the publication date of the RFC "should" yield
> the same contents.  If an RFC references a URL that is unstable
> enough for us to notice and complain about it, the URL should not
> have been used in the first place.

But as I tried to explain in my note, _it doesn't matter_ whether the
URL is stable during the time you happen to be checking. 

When you make a reference to a book, magazine article, or newspaper
column, you always include information like the series, edition,
publication date, and so on.  This isn't for decoration; it's there so
that later, if someone wanted to look the thing up again, they could.
Such a desire could happen years later.  (Irrelevant aside: In a
previous career I was regularly reading things about eighty years old,
but I could still follow the citations back to the source that my
author had been reading.  In one case, this turned out to be really
significant because my author happened to be reading a really bad
translation, and a fundamental part of his confusion was easily
explained once you realised that the translation he'd been working
with sucked.)

In the age of the web, this ability is almost certainly lost.  We can,
however, at least know from the citation when the information was
current.  That knowledge alone could turn out to be useful.  Suppose,
for instance, that it's necessary to refer to evidence gathered by the
foobar project, and that the foobar project only publishes its stuff
on its website.  The URL of the website is certainly the most
authoritative source, and therefore the most stable reference
available, because it happens to be the only such reference.  Now, if
you happen to know that version 1 of the foobar project (call it
wikifoobar) was maintained until 12 December 2010, when a fork
happened and version 2 (call it openfoobar) competed with version 1
for being the "correct" version, then knowing that the reference was
generated on 30 November 2010 will give you a pretty good clue about
what version of the foobar project you need to go chase, even years
later.

RFCs form an archival series, and we need to use archival-series rules
for references in them.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:17:52 +0100

On 14.12.2010 22:10, Tony Hansen wrote:
>> of the I-D is vouching for any references they use), it's
> ...

It depends.

There are cases where you *want* the current version, not the one 
current when the document was published. For instance, 
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-holsten-about-uri-scheme-06#section-5.4> 
has:

>    This is not an exhaustive list.  Many more are supported by numerous
>    applications.  For more examples, consult Wikipedia's entry on the
>    "about: URI Scheme" [wikiabout].

...which I personally think is totally fine.

Best regards, Julian

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:39:35 -0500

>> relevant Wikipedia pages.

Dear Andrew;

By some magic of cut and paste this was assigned to me, but it was apparently written
by Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>.

I actually don't agree with that and think that "temporal coordinates" (such as 

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internet_Engineering_Task_Force&oldid=390092590 )

should be used for any actual reference*. I even wonder if URL references
should include a cryptographic hash of the content so that users can verify it is in fact unchanged. 

Regards
Marshall

* I can see that it might be useful in some cases to have references such as to the URL for
IANA port assignments, where the current version is what's wanted, but that is not the common use
of a reference.

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:53:13 -0500

> by Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>.

My apologies.  That seems to be due to careless trimming on my part.

It's nice to be useful as an example, though: if we didn't have a
stable archive, then it would be hard to see what happened.  As it is,
it's fairly easy to see what I did.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

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From: "t.petch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:31:22 +0100

I notice that the RFC Editor has a Citations Committee; should they be
responding to this issue?

Tom Petch