LRN2INTERNET, dearest APA.

[azurelunatic]

[00:21] Azz: My day is not complete without sending a cranky email to the APA.
[00:27] Azz: compare and contrast the section on "domain name extension" here: http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html with http://www.pir.org/index.php?db=content/FAQs&tbl=FAQs_Registrant&id=1#q4 and http://www.pir.org/index.php?db=content/FAQs&tbl=FAQs_Registrant&id=1#q7
[00:27] Azz: note that pir.org is the place that ICANN tells me is in charge of .org domains.
[00:28] Azz: in conclusion, the APA article can kiss my domain-atrix behind.

Yes, this is the American Psychological Association, mother of the APA Style, that I'm cranky with today.

Accessed 2009 06 15:

The domain name extension (in the preceding example, ".org") can help you determine the appropriateness of the source for your purpose. Different extensions are used depending on what entity hosts the site. For example, the extensions ".edu" and ".org" are for educational institutions and nonprofit organizations; ".gov" and ".mil" are used for government and military sites, respectively; and ".com" and ".biz" are used for commercial sites. Domain name extensions may also include a country code (e.g., ".ca" for Canada or ".nz" for New Zealand).

Ditto:

4. Can I register a .ORG domain name?
Yes. .ORG always has been -- and will continue to be -- an open and unrestricted domain. Anyone is allowed to register and use .ORG domain names.

.ORG is the home for millions of nonprofit Web sites, including charitable, artistic, scientific, personal, educational, social, cultural and religious sites.

.ORG sites are run by clubs, incorporated and unincorporated not-for-profit organizations, industry associations, families, individuals, schools, foundations, and more. Even for-profit companies have .ORG sites devoted to their noncommercial activities, such as charitable or volunteer programs.

Many noncommercial organizations conduct commerce to support their activities. Examples include clubs that raise funds, hospitals, noncommercial Web sites that run advertising to support their operations, etc.
...

7. I found a .ORG Web site that is commercial in nature. Is this allowed?
Yes. .ORG is an unrestricted top-level domain, and anyone can register.

8. Why isn't .ORG strictly limited to not-for-profits?
.ORG has been an open and unrestricted domain since it was created in the 1980s. It would be difficult, expensive and sometimes unfair to impose new restrictions. For example:

• It would be difficult to determine what is a not-for-profit and what isn't. Every country has different laws and definitions about what a nonprofit is.
• Verifying the site and credentials of every applicant around the world could multiply the cost and time for registering a .ORG domain name. Verification would require many staff people who read different languages and would slow down the registration process from minutes to weeks or months. PIR receives just $6 per year for each .ORG domain name, most of which goes to running and improving .ORG's infrastructure and technology.
• Because .ORG has been unrestricted for so long, it would be unfair to take domain names away from people who registered them under old requirements.

Why do I care when someone is wrong on the internet? Because this is the APA. They are one of the definitive style sources that other organizations and educational institutions require in formatting academic papers. They are wrong on the internet and in print. People are using their wrong as an authoritative reference material. People are teaching their wrong to impressionable teenagers and non-technical adults.

It is irresponsible of the APA to imply that all .org websites are owned by non-profit organizations; it is irresponsible to imply that there is the same screening infrastructure in place for owners of .org domains that there is in place for .edu domains. This is not true. Anyone who has access to a credit card and telephone may lawfully purchase a .org domain name, and put whatever they like on it. The contents of .org domain websites are only as reliable and authoritative as the organization that owns the website. The sooner this myth gets busted in schools the better.



Cross-discussion.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

So I guess I can quote the Lightning War Wiki in a paper? After all it's an .org site! Good to know!

[azurelunatic]

A teacher adhering to the APA Style Manual but too busy to visit the links might never notice!

[dreamatdrew]

for things like this we need a "YAY" button

[azurelunatic]

Whyfore the yaying?

[cynthia1960]

Heh. I own warriorgoddess.org, and fit your last paragraph to a T.

[azurelunatic]

And heck, look where we're having this conversation.

[amokk]

I own a .org domain. I offered a forwarding email to my dad, but he told me after talking to some other relatives that .org are not real domains and it wasn't possible for me to have that.

Of course, all involved are 55+ years old, but still. I was amused.

[azurelunatic]

... not real.

Um, wow.

[amokk]

Yeah. Same uncle said it was not possible to erase a hard drive, that it always left things "hidden" and could always be recovered, and the only way to prevent people from getting the information on it was to kill it with a drill, because that's what the local news reported.

Ah, technology.

I think the "not real" was more along the lines of I couldn't have had it because I wasn't a non-profit or something, like I claimed to have a .gov or .edu domain without any credentials. And this was like, 5 years ago. That whole ".org are only for non-profits" has been around for a long, long time.

[azurelunatic]

I would be exceptionally surprised if he had the kind of data that would warrant any interest from people with whatever the latest advances in trace magnetic ghost data recovery are.

(And if he has that kind of attention on his data, I wouldn't trust a drill. That just takes out that single area. One would have to have some more specialized equipment though...)

[amokk]

But, the tv news said that's all you need!

Yeah, I was a bit flustered at the time, but there's just no arguing with some relatives.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Do they also claim .net is only for network infrastructure providers?

I understand that "non-profit organisations" was the original *intention* for the .org TLD, but it's true that that hasn't been the case *in practice* for years and years. (Ditto for .com and .net; all three are basically "generic" TLDs and have been for quite some time. I think .biz .info .name have gone this way, too.)

By the way, do you know whether .gov and .mil are strictly for the *US* government and military, respectively? I know I used to think that .edu was US-only, but there are a few non-US .edu institutions (e.g. tum.edu in Germany, aka tu-muenchen.de -- though both www.tum.edu and www.tu-muenchen.de appear to redirect to portal.mytum.de currently; how bizarre). (And www.uni-muenchen.de, which I thought was the equivalent, has 'www.lmu.de' in the page title, which I also thought odd; it's kind of a tradition for German universities to have domain names of the form (tu|fh|uni|...)-(cityname).de, so seeing lmu.de as apparently canonical feels odd. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

[azurelunatic]

I have not seen them make a claim on .net domains.

Anyone can register a .biz domain without any screening; looks like .info is similarly unrestricted. However .name still has restrictions in force although they may be honored more in the breech except when challenged.

Both .gov and .mil are US-only, as is .fed.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of .fed, and neither has Wikipedia, though it suggests you might mean .fed.us? Which is fairly clearly US-only, at least last I checked, .us was only available to US people.

(Unlike many other ccTLDs. I wonder how many people in Tonga, Tuvalu, or Niue actually use a .to .tv .nu domain compared to how many people in other countries do so....)

[azurelunatic]

Yes, .fed.us; I was having some capital blindness here.

[wibbble]

.info should be taken as especially non-authoritative because many registrars have .info initial registrations at super-cheap prices.

Hence 'iloveshit.info' - which, strangely, no one bothered to squat on after I let it expire.

[pauamma]

http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/show_faq.asp?code=EDUELIGIBILITY#faq145 hints that some non-US institutions qualify. (And it's not just Germany - see eg, hec.edu and polytechnique.edu.)

[pne.livejournal.com]

And randomly, I wonder whether you remember the time when www.mit.edu was the web site of a student organisation at MIT, and the official MIT web presence was at web.mit.edu.

These days, it's very hard to get away with having your web presence *not* at either www.example.com or example.com; anything else (web.example.com, athena.example.com, whatever) *without* a redirect at www.example.com and/or example.com will probably lead to lots of confusion.

Funny how that standard seems to have set itself.

(And FWIW, simply http://example.com/ seems Bad and Wrong to me. You connect to a *host* with HTTP, not to a domain. It's not like mail where a domain has MX records, since I don't think any HTTP client checks SRV records, which could provide that service for "what's the appropriate default web host for this domain"....)

[azurelunatic]

I either haven't been on the internet long enough to remember that, or haven't been visiting the MIT website long enough.

It also occurs to me that their recommendation of .edu addresses as more authoritative than other places disregards situations like example.edu/students/~jlaurel/crackpottheories/index.html -- perfectly valid content for that domain, not at all authoritative.

[pne.livejournal.com]

It also occurs to me that their recommendation of .edu addresses as more authoritative than other places disregards situations like example.edu/students/~jlaurel/crackpottheories/index.html -- perfectly valid content for that domain, not at all authoritative.

True.

[pauamma]

You may also want to ask them what's an "electroinc document" (sic)