4 ms·

Note that you can permalink to every version of a Wikipedia article using the history tab, e.g. the first version of the Hacker News article [1]. There's also

• acdha 12y ago
  This is true but it's hardly common and has certain drawbacks (ugly URLs, extremely slow performance due to cache misses, and lack of future updates). It's great for a journalist citing sources but it doesn't help with the problem where a writer on deadline checks Wikipedia quickly without exhaustively verifying the content and uses the information to inform their writing without directly quoting it.
• chinpokomon 12y ago
  This mechanism actually sounds like it could solve this problem. By making it policy that citations used in periodicals must link to these versioned pages, there is at least a traceable record about when something cited incorrect information. I could also see this being a service to inform authors when their citations have been invalidated. A truthiness score of an article or blog post could be based on citation accuracy and could be assessed by a third party that specializes in fact checking, but initially it could be done by measuring when a particular like in a Wikipedia article has changed and whether or not that change affects the meaning.
  • vertex-four 12y ago
    Wikipedia has a page explaining how to cite Wikipedia according to various styles[0]. Additionally, when clicking "cite this page" in the sidebar of an article, all links use oldid= fields. (MLA citation is an outlier, as it doesn't link to anything.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia