Re: Clarification for Copyright to referred material in IETF draft

[Simon Josefsson <[e-mail]>]

Julian Reschke <[e-mail]> writes:

> On 14.12.2010 10:57, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote:
>> I would not consider that a link to Wikipedia is ever appropriate in an
>> IETF draft. If it were, then an exact date and time would need to be
>> included in the reference, but I'd be unhappy even with that. (This is
>> not for copyright reasons.)
>> ...
>
> Out of curiosity, and because there may be drafts in the pipeline
> having links like that...: for which reasons?
>
> (I see why we wouldn't want to cite anything *normatively* there, so
> you don't need to explain that part...)

There is a bunch of RFCs with references to Wikipedia:

jas@latte:~/rfc$ rgrep wikipedia rfc*.txt
rfc4824.txt:                en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore#Modern_semaphore>.
rfc4984.txt:                Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law,
rfc5290.txt:             "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality".
rfc5345.txt:   [1]  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pcap>
rfc5456.txt:   but [wikipedia] lists thirteen other publicly available
rfc5456.txt:   [wikipedia]  Wikipedia, "Inter-Asterisk eXchange",
rfc5456.txt:                <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAX>.
rfc5638.txt:         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Applications.
rfc5687.txt:                   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Discovery_Protocol>.
rfc5975.txt:                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness.
jas@latte:~/rfc$ 

All are informational RFCs, except for RFC 5975 which is Experimental
but the reference is informational only.

I don't see a problem with this.  If there are better references, that
is great and they should be preferred, but Wikipedia has useful
information and stable URLs, which makes it on par or better than other
external references.

/Simon