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 <[email protected]>.

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
> [email protected]
> Shinkuro, Inc.
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> 

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