User talk:R Duggan

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A discussion with IMSoP not answered at the help desk
I didn't receive an answer to my response to your response to a question I asked on Nov 19. As the days passed, I figure I must have done something wrong, and copied the whole thing in case it disappeared. So, I'd appreciate your additional thoughts. Thanks!

Original Title
Is the content of external links automatically saved with the article?

Original Question
I'm a brand new editor and even though I have been all over help topics and FAQ's, etc, I haven't seen any discussion as to whether the content of an external link (to a current newspaper article for example) is saved in Wikipedia when the footnote is cited. Maybe this is so obvious that no explanation is deemed necessary?

It's come up for me in relation to an article in which the English translation of a Spanish language letter is in dispute. The original letter (and an English translation),appeared in a local newspaper and are cited in the article. Will both still be available in six months or two years for instance, even if the newspaper purges its old stories online?

R Duggan 20:42, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Answer from Trebor
If you use the template for citing web sources, there is a parameter called accessdate. This means the citation will show when the page was last confirmed to have the correct information, and allows you to look up the page on the Internet Archive. Trebor 21:44, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Your Answer
It might be worth mentionning why this is the best we can do: On the technical side, storing a copy of every web-page mentionned in an article would potentially require a huge amount of disk-space, and there would still need to be some way of telling when the copy was taken, of manually updating the copy if the resource changed "for the better", of letting the user choose the real thing or the local copy, etc.

Secondly, there would be potential for abuse - just by linking to a page, you would force Wikipedia's servers to take a copy of it, and become party to distributing it, opening up potential legal and moral quagmires if the content were illegal or highly objectionable.

Perhaps most importantly, though, there are extremely complex issues of copyright involved in taking verbatim copies of someone else's website - even sites like Google and the Internet Archive have to be very careful how they deal with this, and some services request that their content not be stored in this way.

Essentially, the concept is no different to a reference in any old-fashioned publication - you might reference "The Times, 2nd Nov 2006", but you wouldn't normally include a copy of that paper, or even the article in question; instead, you'd rely on the user seeking it out, and if it became unavailable, nobody would blame you. - IMSoP 22:11, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

My additional Question
Thank you for your thoughtful and helpful answer! In most cases this seems like a satisfactory solution, and as you said, it's no different than in the print media. I'd like to discuss this further though in connection with a particular article;Tan Nguyen. I followed the link to Internet Archive and learned that not in every case are pages archived. In the case of the Nguyen article, the heart of the story is a letter that was sent to 16,000 voters-some of whom found it intimidating. A criminal investigation is pending as to who sent the letter and there are those who think that Nguyen had something to do with it.

Regardless of how the investigation comes out; if Nguyen runs for some other political position some time in the future (Or is selected as Ambassador to Mexico in the closing hours of the Bush administration :)) it seems important to have an original copy of the letter somewhere in the story or on the talk page because there are at least two very much conflicting English translations of the letter which appeared in the days before the Nov 7 election. (Did I say the original letter was in Spanish?)

While I can understand that an English translation of the letter might have copyright problems, would the same be true of the original Spanish letter that was sent to 16,000 members of the public? I'm aware that there is an additional problem beyond that of the copyright in that that it's in Spanish and this is an English wiki.

Soooooo, have you any additional suggestions as to how I might edit that particular article so that it will remain useful in the future? Thanks --R Duggan 04:01, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:R_Duggan/Sandbox"

My - I mean your, erm, IMSoP's - additional answer
Firstly, can I just apologise for not seeing your question earlier - for various reasons, my use of Wikipedia is a little sporadic, and since my watchlist is rather in need of pruning, I can easily miss things from one visit to the next.

The point you raise is indeed an interesting one, in that Wikipedia certainly aims to reference its sources wherever possible, and if those sources are at risk of deletion elsewhere, referencing them is meaningless. However, it is still not the role of an encylopedia to hold those sources, as such, though I suppose you could argue that inclusion outside the article (in the Talk page or whatever) would be like a publishing house having filing cabinets of clippings for future reference.

However, I think there may be an even better place to preserve this information, in the form of Wikisource. I'm no expert on the exact purpose and policies of that project, but if this letter is of historical / evidential importance, it would probably be exactly the kind of "source text" they're talking about. Obviously, copyright is still an issue, wherever you publish something you didn't create yourself, and you'll have to read their inclusion policy for yourself, but it would be a better "fit" there than hidden away somewhere here.

One last point worth making is that unlike your original question suggested, this is not about taking copies of any particular website, but rather on having a stable repository for certain important documents that happen to be currently available there - in this case, for instance, we're talking about the letter, not any newspaper article about it. As well as very different copyright concerns, this is significant technically - unlike a human, no current computer program could tell by looking at a website what was "source text", what discussion, and what just navigation, styling, etc.

I hope this has been of some help, and sorry again for the delay. - IMSoP 16:13, 2 December 2006 (UTC)