Web Pages Are Weak Links in the Chain of Knowledge

Posted by Hemos on Monday November 24, 2003 @02:27AM from the destroying-our-young dept.

PizzaFace writes "Contributions to science, law, and other scholarly fields rely for their authority on citations to earlier publications. The ease of publishing on the web has made it an explosively popular medium, and web pages are increasingly cited as authorities in other publications. But easy come, easy go: web pages often get moved or removed, and publications that cite them lose their authorities. The Washington Post reports on the loss of knowledge in ephemeral web pages, which a medical researcher compares to the burning of ancient Alexandria's library. As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.""

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Look at Microsoft by willpost · 2003-11-24 02:47 · Score: 1, Offtopic

One month a thoughtful Microsoft programmer will post the bug on a page with a workaround, source code, and a patch using Visual Studio.

The next month the bug officially doesn't exist, the workaround page is gone, the source code is who knows where, and it's .Net

If you go to Linux.org though, the FAQ and bug postings are preserved for all to see.

You're right though, in that Microsoft should be identified as one of those bad sources anyway.