A meme that has been going around is that you can’t cite Wikipedia.

You can’t Cite Wikipedia Academically

Now it’s well known and generally agreed that you can’t cite Wikipedia for a scientific paper or other serious academic work. This makes sense firstly because Wikipedia changes, both in the short term (including vandalism) and in the long term (due to changes in technology, new archaeological discoveries, current events, etc). But you can link to a particular version of a Wikipedia page, you can just click on the history tab at the top of the screen and then click on the date of the version for which you want a direct permanent link.

The real reason for not linking to Wikipedia articles in academic publications is that you want to reference the original research not a report on it, which really makes sense. Of course the down-side is that you might reference some data that is in the middle of a 100 page report, in which case you might have to mention the page number as well. Also often the summary of the data you desire simply isn’t available anywhere else, someone might for example take some facts from 10 different pages of a government document and summarise them neatly in a single paragraph on Wikipedia. This isn’t a huge obstacle but just takes more time to create your own summary with references.

When Wikipedia is Suitable

The real issue however is how serious the document you are writing is and how much time you are prepared to spend on it. If I’m writing a message to a mailing list or a comment on a blog post then I probably won’t bother reading all the primary sources of Wikipedia pages, it would just waste too much of my time. Wikipedia is adequate for the vast majority of mailing list discussions.

If I’m discussing several choices for software with some colleagues we will probably start by reading the Wikipedia pages, if one option doesn’t appear to have the necessary features (according to Wikipedia) then we may ask the vendor if those features are really missing and if so whether they will be added in the next version – but we may decide that we don’t really need the features in question and modify our deployment plans. Many business decisions are made with incomplete data, time is money and there often isn’t time to do everything you want to do. Using Wikipedia as a primary source for business decisions is a way of trading off a little accuracy for a huge time saving. This is significantly better than the old fashioned approach of comparing products by reading their brochures – companies LIE in their advertising!

When writing blog posts the choice of whether to use Wikipedia as a reference depends on the point that you are trying to make and how serious the post is. If the post isn’t really serious or contentious or if the Wikipedia reference is for some facts that are not likely to be disputed then Wikipedia will probably do. For some posts a reference to a primary source will be better.

A blog post that references data that is behind a pay-wall (such as a significant portion of academic papers and news articles) is practically of less use than a post that cites Wikipedia. In most cases Wikipedia references free primary sources on the Internet (although it does sometimes refer to dead tree products and data that is behind a pay-wall). In the minority of cases where the primary references for a Wikipedia page are not available for free on the Internet there will be people searching for freely available references to replace the non-free ones. So if you refer to a Wikipedia page with non-free references a future reader might find that someone has added free references to it.

The Annoying People

One thing that often happens is that an Internet discussion contains no references for anything – it’s all just unsupported assertions. Then if anyone cites Wikipedia someone jumps in with “you can’t cite Wikipedia“. If you want to criticise Wikipedia references then please first start by criticising people who state opinions as fact and people who provide numbers without telling anyone where they came from! The Guinness Book of Records (now known as “Guinness World Records”) was devised as a reference to cite in debates in pubs [1]. It seems that most of the people who dismiss references to Wikipedia on the net would prefer that Internet debates have lower requirements for references than a pub debate.

When Wikipedia is cited in an online discussion it is usually a matter of one mouse click to check the references for the data in question. If Wikipedia happens to be wrong then anyone who cares can correct it. Saying “the Wikipedia page you cited had some transcription errors in copying data from primary sources and some of the other data was not attributed, I’ve corrected the numbers and noted that it contains original research” would be a very effective rebuttal to an argument that relies on data in Wikipedia. Saying “you can’t cite Wikipedia” means little, particularly if you happen to be strongly advocating an opposing position while not providing any references.

If one person cites an academic paper and someone else cites Wikipedia then it seems reasonable to assume that the academic paper is the better reference. But when it’s a choice between Wikipedia and no reference then surely Wikipedia should win! Also references to non-free data are not much good for supporting an argument, that’s really just unverified claims as far as most people can determine – therefore the issue becomes how much the person citing the non-free reference can be trusted to correctly understand and summarise the non-free data.

Also it has to be considered that not all primary sources are equal. Opinion pieces should be considered to have a fairly low value and while they are authoritative for representing the opinion of the person who wrote them they often prove little else – unless they happen to cite good references which brings them to the same level as Wikipedia. The main benefit for linking to opinion pieces is that it saves time typing and gives a better product for the readers – it’s sometimes easier to find someone else expressing an opinion well than to express it yourself.

So please, don’t criticise me for citing Wikipedia unless others in the discussion are citing better references. If most people are not citing any references or only citing opinion pieces then a Wikipedia page may be the best reference that is being provided!

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_book_of_records

Over the last few days I’ve got this blog and my documents blog to conform to valid XHTML according to the W3C validation service [1].

One significant change that I made was to use lower-case for HTML tags. For about 15 years I’ve been using capitals for tags to make them stand out from content and my blogs are the latest in a long line of web sites with that. Naturally I wasn’t going to correct 900 posts manually so I ran a series of SQL commands such as the following on my database server (where X is the WordPress table prefix):

update X_wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'<PRE>','<pre>');

But make sure you have a good backup of your database before running SQL search and replace commands on your blog data.

After running such commands about 90% of my blog posts conformed, so I only needed to edit about 90 posts to correct things. This process gave some real benefits. One issue is that an apostrophe in a URL must be quoted, otherwise some browsers will link to the desired URL and some will link to a truncated URL. Fixing a couple of variations of this problem resulted in some broken links being fixed. Another issue is that you can’t have paragraphs (<p> tags) within list items, fixing this made some of my posts align correctly – it was a tricky fix, in some cases I had to use <br/> to break up text in a list item and sometimes I replaced lists with different sections delimited by <h3> headings (which apparently is rumored to give better SEO).

It would make a really nice WordPress feature to be able to do W3C validation as part of the publishing process, ideally an attempt to publish or schedule a post would result in a message saying “saved as a draft because it’s not valid XHTML” if the checks failed. The source to the W3C validation software is significantly larger than WordPress [2], but it seems to me that there are two main types of WordPress installations, small ones for personal use (which tend to be on fairly idle servers) and big ones that have so much traffic that the resource usage of validation would be nothing compared to the ongoing load.

As there seems to be no way of validating my posts before publication my best option is the W3C button I now have on my blog. This allows me to validate the page at a click so while I can’t entirely avoid the risk of publishing a post with invalid XHTML I can at least fix it rapidly enough that hardly anyone will notice.

It also seems like a useful feature to have aggregators like Venus [3] check for valid HTML and not display posts unless they are valid. It’s not a feature that could be enabled immediately (I’m sure that if you click on this link to the W3C validation service [1] from a Planet feed you will see lots of errors and warnings), but once bloggers have time to fix their installation it would allow preventing some of the common annoyances of Planet installations. It’s not uncommon on popular Planets to have unmatched tags in a post which results in significant amounts of the content being bold, underlined, in italics, or for the greatest annoyance struck-out. I know that this may be a controversial suggestion, but please consider why you are blogging – if you are blogging for the benefit of your readers (which seems to be the case for everyone other than sploggers) then it seems that the readers will benefit more by not having a broken post syndicated than they would benefit from having it syndicated and thus messing up the display of many following posts.

The next thing on my todo list in this regard is to do some tests of accessibility. The work that I have done to pass the XHTML validation tests has helped to some degree – if nothing else the images now all have alt= descriptions, but I expect that it will be a lot of work. The WordPress Codex has a page about accessibility, I haven’t read all of it yet [4].

Does anyone have any recommendations for free automated systems that check web sites for accessibility? What would be ideal is a service that allows different levels of warnings, so instead of trying to fix all problems at once I could start by quickly fixing the most serious problems on the most popular posts and finish the job at some later date.

• [1] http://validator.w3.org/
• [2] http://validator.w3.org/source/
• [3] http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/
• [4] http://codex.wordpress.org/Accessibility

I’ve just added the WordPress Minify [1] plugin to my blog. It’s purpose is to combine CSS and Javascript files and to optimise them for size and it’s based on the Minify project [2]. On my documents blog this takes the main page from 313KB uncompressed, 169KB compressed, and a total of 23 HTTP transfers to 306KB uncompressed, 117KB compressed, and 21 HTTP transfers. In each case 10 of the HTTP transfers are from Google for advertising. It seems that a major obstacle to optimising the web page load times is Google adverts – of course Google has faster servers than I do so I guess it’s not that much of a performance problem. The minify plugin caches it’s data files and I had to really hack at the code to make it use /var/cache/wordpress-minify – a subdirectory of the plugins directory was specified in many places.

deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny wordpress
I’ve added a wordpress-minify package to my repository of WordPress packages for Debian/Lenny with the above APT line. I’ve also got the following packages:
adman
all-in-one-seo-pack
google-sitemap-generator
openid
permalink-redirect
stats
subscribe-to-comments
yubikey

The Super Cache [3] plugin has some nice features. It generates static HTML files that are served to users who aren’t logged in and who haven’t entered a comment. This saves significant amounts of CPU time when there is high load. The problem is that installing this requires modifying the main .htaccess file, adding a new .htaccess file in the plugins directory, and lots of other hackery. The main reason for this is to avoid running any PHP code in the most common cases, it would be good for really heavy use. Also PHP “safe mode” has to be disabled for some reason, which is something I’d rather not do.

The Cache [4] plugin was used as the base for the Super Cache plugin. It seems less invasive, but requires the ability to edit the config file. Getting it into a shape that would work well in Debian would take more time than I have available at the moment. This combined with the fact that my blog will soon be running on a system with two quad-core CPUs that won’t be very busy means that I won’t be packaging it.

If anyone would like to Debianise the Cache or Super Cache plugin then I would be happy to give them my rough initial efforts as a possible starting point.

I’m not planning to upload any of these packages to Debian, it would just add too much work to the Debian security team without adding enough benefit.

• [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/
• [2] http://code.google.com/p/minify/
• [3] http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/
• [4] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/

I recently discovered the Help A Reporter Out [1] service.

Subscribers receive three messages every business day each of which contains about 40 queries from journalists. People who subscribe can contact the journalist to provide information or offer an interview. Any journalist can send in a query. Peter Shankman runs this, it seems that it helps promote his other business ventures and there is also a paid advert at the top of every message.

This has to be one of the best services that I have ever unsubscribed from! The vast majority of the questions are about topics that are not relevant to me – there are typically about 6 IT related questions per day out of 100+.

I would like to see a “Help An IT Reporter Out” service. It could consist of a single email per day which might have 10 questions due to a more focussed market. This would take less time to skim read which would make it more appealing to most people who are doing interesting things with computers. Then of course it could allow targeted messages related to different IT sectors (servers, desktops, PDA/phones), technologies, etc. Exporting the questions to Twitter would be good for people who like that sort of thing.

If anyone wants to start such a service then let me know and I’ll promote it on my blog.

• [1] http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/

Steve Kemp writes about his concerns for what happens to his data after death [1]. Basically everything will go away when bills stop being paid. If you have hosting on a monthly basis (IE a Xen DomU) then when the bank account used for the bill payment is locked (maybe a week after death) the count-down to hosting expiry starts. As noted in Steve’s post it is possible to pay for things in advance, but everything will run out eventually.

One option is to have relatives keep the data online. With hard drives getting bigger all the time it wouldn’t be difficult to backup the web sites for everyone in your family to a USB flash device and then put it online at a suitable place. Of course that relies on having relatives with the skill and interest necessary.

The difficult part is links, if the domain expires then links will be broken. One way of alleviating this would be to host content with Blogger, Livejournal, or other similar services. But then instead of the risk of a domain being lost you have the risk of a hosting company going bankrupt.

It seems to me that the ideal solution would be to have a hosting company take over the web sites of deceased people and put adverts on them to cover the hosting costs. As the amount of money being spent on Internet advertising will only increase while the costs of hosting steadily go down it seems that collecting a lot of content for advertising purposes would be a good business model. If the web sites of dead people are profitable then they will remain online.

It wouldn’t be technically difficult to extract the data from a blog server such as WordPress (either from a database dump or crawling the web site), change the intra-site links to point to a different domain name, and then put it online as static content with adverts. If a single company (such as Google) had a large portion of the market of hosting the web sites of dead people then when someone died and had their web site transferred the links on the other sites maintained by the same company could be automatically adjusted to match. A premium service from such a company could be to manage the domain. If they were in the domain registrar business it would be easy to allow someone to pay for 10 or 20 years after their death. Possibly with a portion of the advertising revenue going towards extending the domain registration. I think that this idea has some business potential, I don’t have the time or energy to implement it myself and my clients are busy on other things so I’m offering it to the world.

Cory Doctorow has written an article for the Guardian about a related issue – how to allow the next of kin to access encrypted data when someone is dead [2]. One obvious point that he missed is the possibility that he might forget his own password, a small injury from a car accident could cause that problem.

It seems strange to me that someone would have a great deal of secret data that needs strong encryption but yet has some value after they are dead. Archives of past correspondence to/from someone who is dead is one category of secret data that is really of little use to anyone unless the deceased was particularly famous. Probably the majority of encrypted data from a dead person would be best wiped.

For the contents of personal computers the best strategy would probably be to start by dividing the data into categories according to the secrecy requirements. Publish the things that aren’t secret, store a lot of data unencrypted (things that are not really secret but you merely don’t want to share them with the world), have a large encrypted partition that will have it’s contents lost when you die, and have a very small encrypted device that has bank passwords and other data that is actually useful for the executors of the will.

One thing that we really need is to have law firms that have greater technical skills. It would be good if the law firms that help people draw up wills could advise them on such issues and act as a repository for such data. It seems to me that the technical skills that are common within law firms are not adequate for the task of guarding secret electronic data for clients.

• [1] http://blog.steve.org.uk/there_s_something_out_there_waiting_for_us__and_it_ain_t_no_man_.html
• [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/30/data-protection-internet