Talk:International Services Trade Information Agency

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If someone has a specific editing issue, kindly leave a message on this page. Wikipedia asked for a "cleanup" without being specific. All of the links on the page work. Can Wikipedia please be more specific about what is needed to be cleaned up? Thanks in advance. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Istia (talk • contribs). 01:52, 7 July 2006

For a start, it has far too many external links and far too many categories. Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links. Much of the page recycles http://www.servicestrade.org/ and especially http://www.diplomaticwebsites.ch/ISTIA/statlist.htm . Neither the website nor the article say who set it up. --Henrygb 09:33, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Henry, I'm Jennifer Powell, Executive Director of ISTIA. I set up the website, and founded ISTIA as an international agency in Geneva, Switzerland. The reason that many of the sources link to our site is that those documents (most of which are WTO official papers) aren't available on the web. In the WTO Document Dissemination Facility database (where the files are publicly available), these are only available in .rtf format. Now .rtf files aren't anything that most people have heard of, and that MS Word does not open. ISTIA went to the extra work of converting these files, and placing them on our server, so that they are readable. I don't know why the WTO keeps the files in .rtf format. It would help users of the database if they were in text or .doc format. From the perspective of ISTIA, it is important to make these files easily accessible so that it can be easily seen that governments have made official requests for this kind of help. For example of this problem, try doing a search on the WTO Document Dissemination Facility for documents such as MTN.GNS/W/5/Add.1. If ISTIA didn't reformat these documents, they would be unreadable to most persons. If you have further comments or suggestions, please contact me on the talk page - thanks.

ISTIA - The same comment as above can be made about the link to: many official and informal requests - all of those documents are on the WTO Document Dissemination Facility - but many of them are in .rtf format.

Response to why research papers are on the diplomaticwebsites.ch website: I've been linking to those papers for a long time, on the ISTIA website, and since they are usually on government websites, their IT department tends to change the link quite often. After re-formatting the link about 10 times, I simply placed them on our server. BEA and OECD (and other government) websites tend to shift the papers they store publicly, and even take them off the web after a while. --istia 10:18, 12 July 2006 (UTC)