geni wrote: > On 14 October 2011 21:10, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes. >> >> http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html >> >> To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all >> bother doing this. > > Doubtful. Heck to some extent its probably our fault. Why bother > holding books on say warships when Wikipedia already provides an > unreasonable amount of information about them. So out go the old > warship annuals. Except they don't even bother to remove them from the > catalog (me bitter?)
My view is that they should be kept, at least to assist in applying verifiability policies, and if necessary, assessing neutrality. Not every source is online, nor is necessarily going to be, even with increasing digitisation of original sources. Copyright time limits mean that it may be many years before they are eligible for Wikisource, or Commons, and in the meantime, we seem to be limited to online extracts, citations in other works, or the originals. This is particularly true of ephemeral media such as newspapers, although I am aware that the British Library only has issues going back to 1840 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library#Newspapers), but that might be enough for most purposes. > There is relatively little destruction of actual information going on. > As well as a lot of the stuff being fiction the non-fiction stuff is > mostly one of multiple copies. I agree, but we have no way of knowing. However, lots of non-fiction is never going to achieve notability, so that may not be a great loss. > The problem is it does cause is that the information is increasingly > locked up. Paper archives have for the last decade or so one of the > loopholes in payways. With the removal of such archives the paywalls > become more controlling. Similarly, state-controlled/funded archives are vulnerable, in the extreme, to manipulation and/or destruction. And in the UK at least, all significant archives (British Library/local libraries/universities) are pretty dependent on public funding. Without a truly independent, privately funded, more or less complete archive of everything, there is always a risk of attrition for one reason or another. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
