ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Wikipedia

2010-12-15 11:01:22
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
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf