User:R Duggan/Sandbox

(mumble, mumble, what am I going to add to my user page to describe myself?)I was born in 1944 on the East Coast of the USA and moved to the West Coast when I was about 20. I've spent the rest of my life in the Pacific Northwest and currently live amongst the trees up against the Olympic Mountains on a small farm where I keep a herd of goats for milk, meat and my mental health.

For most of my working life I've made sort of a living as a writer of one kind or another; small business marketing studies, social services research studies, grant writing, grant evaluations, several post graduate texts, an academic publication or two, newsletters, press releases and most recently, community news stories as a freelance writer for two area newspapers.

I've also built a couple of small houses-one of which I live in-very small, and numerous outbuildings and barns. I ran a cabinet shop and did picture framing for seveal years, and some other things to fill in the gaps, like driving cab which was much fun in a smaller, gentler Seattle.

(that's enough for now-it's HARD to talk about myself)

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

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)

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)

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)

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 your 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)