Talk:astroboffin

Deletion debate
Three citations all from The Register, which is not durably archived and is known for its own quirky slang &mdash; does nobody else use the word? Equinox ◑ 10:22, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The hyphenated form astro-boffin yielded four non-Register cites (two from the Australian paper The Age). The solid form got one hit on Usenet from 1999, under the sense "astrologer/astrology enthusiast." Personally, I don't see a reason to rule out citations from The Register, a prominent online news site that's been around as long as the Usenet archive-hosting Google (maybe even a little longer). There's nothing in WT:CFI that explicitly says online media other than Google Groups cannot meet the "durably archived" criterion. I understand that's a common interpretation, but unwritten rules aren't policy. WT:CFI also says citations only have to be from three different authors. It doesn't specify they must be from three different publishers. Astral (talk) 18:02, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
 * The theory is that Usenet is not tied to Google, that anyone can archive Usenet. It doesn't matter how long the Register has been around; what matters is if they're durably available, if a link to their website that worked 10 years ago will work 10 years from now, that articles won't just disappear on us. I see no reason to think that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:21, 29 April 2013 (UTC).
 * The Register has an archive of content going back nearly fifteen years. Granted, the URLs of specific articles might change over time, but to regard that as a significant obstacle rather than a mild inconvenience is to overlook the fact that Wiktionary is a wiki, and that it is a simple task to Google an article's title and replace an outdated link with a functioning one. And if a replacement link can't be found, well, you cross that bridge when you come to it. Other viable citations will probably have cropped up by then. My point is that it doesn't make sense to me to rule out prominent news and commentary sites with proven longevity like The Register on the off chance they might not be around in ten years. There's a chance (however small) that Google will fold in the next decade and no one will take over the responsibility of maintaining a publicly-accessible Usenet archive. Some outcomes can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty (like the ephemeral nature of Tumblr blogs), but we can't foresee everything, and it's counterproductive to try to base policy around such predictions. WT:CRYSTAL? Astral (talk) 05:30, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I see the lines differently then you do; by citing physical books, we're citing things that have a life expectancy of at least 500 years. Usenet is a handwave towards convenience with a half-assed promise of durability. Saying that we should accept something because we can't prove it's durable is the wrong way around; we should accept things that we know to be durable only.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
 * How do we no that physical books are durable. In a sense they're definitely not. They won't last literally forever. Yet my kind of talk is not popular here. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:53, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Durable doesn't mean lasts forever, it means lasting, for a long time. We know that physical books are durable since we have books from a millennium ago, and in the past century or two, libraries have been pretty solid about collecting and safely storing most every book. We have the printed New York Times going back 150 years, with copies in hundreds of libraries, some with histories of archiving materials for centuries; on the flip side, The Register goes back nearly fifteen years and it's held by one source. They're simply not comparable in durability.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:40, 30 April 2013 (UTC)


 * How many libraries, aside from a few major ones, have both the space to maintain a collection of every issue of a newspaper ever printed and the resources required to preserve it? Plenty have converted their collections to microfiche. So while the original physical paper technically continues to exist in some archives, the version most people are able to reference is a copy, and if it's a digital scan from microfiche as can occasionally be found on Google News Archive, a copy of a copy.
 * Books go out of print. They get destroyed in fires and floods. They decay if not shown proper care. Eventually, the remaining copies end up in museums, library archives, private collections, etc., and and the average person is left with only reprints and digitizations of the original text to consult.
 * Just because a page disappears from the web doesn't mean that every copy of the file ceases to exist along with it: it can safely be assumed that many authors and publishers of online content maintain their own back-up copies, some readers print or download copies for private reference, and of course there's the Internet Archive.
 * I honestly don't understand the general antagonism toward digital media on Wiktionary. Yes, digital media has its drawbacks, but I don't see them as great enough to warrant completely ruling out an entire category of potential citations. Language is an ever-evolving thing, and unless we wish to confine ourselves to covering only archaic and dated terms, we need the ability to rely on the new digital mediums in which things are increasingly being released. Astral (talk) 01:27, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Who cares about whether it's a reprint or a digitization? The fact is that people still have copies of it and want to look up words from it. I think private collections that might exist are irrelevant, and entirely different from libraries that a large number of people can actually access. If you want the Internet Archive to count, bring it up at the Beer Garden; it's clear the standing consensus is against it, but maybe a new consensus can be established.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:29, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Do all the books we like to claim are durable have "The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources" printed in their preface? Spinning Spark  01:55, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
 * (@Prosfilaes, 03:21, 29 April 2013) That may be the theory, but groups.google.com is just deja.com rebranded, http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=453109123 still redirects to http://groups.google.com/getdoc.xp?AN=451127391 but that gives a 502 error. If google URLs have been durable for your whole live, you're quite young. Google acquired deja.com on February 12, 2001, according to w:List of mergers and acquisitions by Google. --80.114.178.7 19:50, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I never claimed that Usenet URLs were stable; we have unique identifiers for Usenet unrelated to a URL.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:28, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Could you tell us what those "unique" identifiers might be? @ might look unique, until one realizes how many s have bit-rotted in just a decade. --80.114.178.7 04:36, 18 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It appears Pakistan Today reprints many The Register articles. Perhaps it can be cited from that. — Ungoliant (Falai) 21:46, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Deleted (so sad, it only needed on more cite). --WikiTiki89 15:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)