Wikipedia:Gave us cookies
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: If you are counting how many cookies a web source has given you, you may have lost sight of how reliable you thought they were just a moment ago, or managed to ignore it. Free cookies is not reliability, even if they've got chocolate chips, sorry. |
Sometimes a website appears with an extra functionality. It might be an archiving website that archives more sites successfully than other archive sites. Everybody wants to use that site. Everybody wants more functionality. People who want less are in an unusual situation.
People want to use the extra functioning site because it makes the other sites look broken. We are told, "This site is a mystery and does not establish the "reputation for fact checking and accuracy" that our manual of style requires," to which a cry goes up, "This other site works! This other site gives us cookies!"
But it is not difficult to set up an archive service which can save more pages. There is a sanctioned code left on websites that do not want their sites accessed by scripts. The reliable and dependable archive services with a "reputation for fact checking and accuracy" follow the instructions of sites which do not want the service available for their sites. An archive site copies all of the information on a webpage.
That archived information is subject to copyright, (you can't just copy all of the books in the library and give them away, unless you like prison stew and bank debt) and that copyright is subject to the owners instruction. So with instructions not to access the site, accessing it and making copies of the content is illegal. So the archiver you wanted to use may give you cookies, but cookies are not about a "reputation for fact checking and accuracy," and the cookies discussed here are illegal...
And we don't need them. If we make unfree content available on the site it will in turn become answerable. So far the site has gone almost a decade and a half without answering to anybody. We don't need to answer to anybody, but only so long as we hold the principles, reputable sources, free content, neutral position, educational mission, free access. Those are not the Wikipedia:Five pillars, but they are what makes this site beyond reproach. Any wide reaching compromise, any wide reaching compromise, challenges this sites integrity.
The fact that a majority of people will periodically attempt to contravene that integrity is the reason that Wikipedias final say is not through democracy. Rationality is not an instinct. And humans are domesticated. If you leave a domesticated dog in a room for two months, with two months worth of food, it will die of starvation. Starve? How? A greedy dog will have the whole thing gone in a week to two weeks. And some dogs wouldn't. Maybe your dog wouldn't. Maybe your dog would last for six months on that food. But most dogs would eat the lot within the first month, because they are compelled to see what happens, for the sake of doing it. They savour the moment. Dogs didn't evolve in locked rooms. They need to feel like they are roaming around. And they also need to feel like they are in contact with everything they see. Dogs will urinate on tree trunks to feel that way. Chimps, on another hand, will hunt down every living creature in hiking distance of their home and kill it, just to be territorial, just to feel as closely in touch with their environment as they can. Humans then, will hunt down every creature within a weeks hike from where they live, and they'll eventually cut down every tree and bush, overturn all grass, poison all water, even tear down the mountains until it seems like they are done. And then they set about hunting each other. But fortunately, if you catch humans before they do all this, and explain to them what the problem is...