Wikipedia: Benjamin Netanyahu On Terrorism/Talk

I don't know if we want to archive such documents in Wikipedia. My initial opinion is that we should, since Wikipedia is not paper. I have included it because it seems relevent to the Anti-Americanism debate that has been raging here recently, and to the whole issue of terrorism.

I also believe that these comments deserve widespread exposure, and if we can help with that, then that's a good thing. But that's independent of the question of what our policy about such documents should be.

This was a speech delivered to Congress, which I believe automatically makes it public domain. - Tim

There's at least one inherent problem with our archiving documents like these: there are literally millions of them in existence (maybe billions). So there's a problem about which ones we'll include. And how we'll name them! Benjamin Netanyahu has probably written and spoken volumes about terrorism. Why should this particular speech be filed under the name it's currently filed under? Anyway, this particular document was included due to its relevance in expressing one view about anti-Americanism; but it seems to me very prejudicial to include just this source document when, indeed, there are no doubt at least thousands of other source documents relevant to anti-Americanism that we might include. The way I see it, this particular document was included mainly in order to make a point in the context of the debate or emotions surrounding our building of a good anti-Americanism article. But we should never upload documents to Wikipedia for the sake of making such a point. That will ultimately debase the project, as all bias and prejudice will. --LMS

An alternative is to use an external link, which we should do when documents are copyrighted. But links are undependable, in that they die, or are replaced with pages unrelated to the original topic; so where the document is public domain, bringing it in house is a more reliable alternative to an external link.

That's assuming that having the cited article available to our readers is one of the goals of Wikipedia. It isn't. That's not in the purview of an encyclopedia. --LMS