On Dec 15, 2010, at 11:37 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 05:24:21PM +0100, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
On 15/Dec/10 03:02, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
IMHO, whether to use temporal coordinates (where available) should be
left to authors' judgment. Some authors diligently monitor the
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 <vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it>.
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.
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
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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