This is why we need the internet archive
this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Yes. And wikis, too.
We (people in general) have a tendency to share stuff in forums, like Lemmy. That's fine in the short term, but in the long term this stuff should be sorted, organised, and preferably mirrored. Wikis are perfect for that, while the internet archive is more like "bulk" storage.
This is why Discord is poison to our shared pool of knowledge, it's such a black hole for many games and software (especially ironically enough open source projects) in lieu of decent docs.
Ugh!
The worst part is, after wasting a bunch of time tracking down the correct Discord server to ask a question about a piece of software, you generally get lambasted by the "regulars" of that server to "just use the search feature, that's what it's for!"
Yeah, no. I don't want to wade through a reverse chronology of a bunch of conflicting back-and-forth conversations - just gimme a FAQ or some actual documentation!!!
Thanks for giving me another bone to pick against Discord ¬¬
Seriously. Fuck Discord.
Wikis are not really a defense against this issue, they are by nature a secondary or (occasionally by policy) a tertiary source of information. Once the source they are recording dies so does the value of that page on the wiki. From the OP:
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
There's nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they're collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it's just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.
And I believe that they could help a lot with this issue if people migrated/copied meaningful info from forums (like Lemmy) to wikis. Forums are good for discussion, but they tend to accumulate a lot of trash; having the good content sieved and sorted in a wiki makes it more accessible for everyone.
Donate to the internet archive!
This is important. I signed up a week ago.
This content has been moving from free accessible internet into the walled gardens of social media. we did it ourselves. blogs and forums disappeared, copycat farms and SEO made it so maintaining blog or a community forum a waste of time, everyone is just tiktoking and looking to monetise every bit of content they put on the internet.
God bless archive.org. Fuck the turds trying to bring it down.
Donate and contact your government rep
run the archivewarrior to help them out, donate or pressure your government to stop it from being killed.
The biggest crime against shared knowledge ever committed is photobucket fucking off with the pictures in every "how to fix this car problem" forum post.
There’s some old Reddit posts like this too. Advice threads where the person who posted a solution went back and overwrote their comments during the boycott last year. I know why they did it but we still lost some information in the grand scheme of things.
And that is why I criticized the decisions every time I read about it. Every time I got mixed responses but ultimately got a higher downvote ratio.
Also a reason I participate(d) in the archive warrior reddit project.
And all the "Thanks! Took two minutes to fix after seeing your post" comments just to rub it in.
This allows the ruling class to write history as they see fit.
I’ve often wondered what the implications of the internet will be for future historians. On the one hand, there is now an enormous body of writings from not just the educated elite as in the past but from all sorts of ordinary people, which is something that has never really existed before.
On the other hand, how and for how long will these writings be retained? If we stop writing things on paper, will these digital writings become completely inaccessible at some point? Could we have a situation where there are almost no writings from a certain period down the road? That would be unfortunate.
Freely licensed works will be preserved a lot better because there will be more copies of them.
Likewise the fediverse is a step in that direction: this message will be federated to hundreds of servers so is more likely to survive longer than if I posted it to reddit.
Already a lot of stuff is becoming one harddrive failure away from being lost forever. Companies don't care about preserving content, so it's largely up to random people happening to have saved a copy of something for it to still exist at all.
And National Libraries and similar institutions around the world, for example https://www.nb.no/en/digital-preservation/
In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
How is this news? I bet a lot of pages were also added in the same time frame, very likely orders of magnitude more.
I’ve heard the early Internet age referred to as the future dark ages. When all the work, information and content is digitized, it’s prone to being lost to history forever.
My partner works in historical archiving for science and medicine. Museum work, basically. He's told me so much of the archives are donated collections of notes, letters, journals, and so on from important doctors, researchers, scientists, etc. Donated by the subject themselves in their later years or by their families.
He's told me there is a growing issue with those people starting to donate entirely digital collections, but even worse than that, are all the documents that are not being stored on a physical hard drive, but on web services and clouds. By the time these people are willing to start donating their things, so much of it has just been deleted forever without them realizing it. Or worse, they die, and their families no longer have access.
Working in IT, I told him about Microsoft's growing push to eliminate Outlook and PST files, make it all web based email, and he wasn't surprised, but he was still bummed to hear it. Apparently a not insignificant amount of those donations are locally stored emails.
And those added pages were probably just as worthless as the ones they replaced.
Because those pages had information that wasn't on the new pages?
Just from my own experience, WotC migrated the Magic the Gathering site to a new one, and while some articles were brought over there were a whole lot of stories, strategies and event coverage that were lost or are only available thanks to Archive.org
Yes. The whole post is a trick with statistics. Web pages have a limited lifespan. You can do the aame trick with human life spans.
"50 % of humans that lived 60 years ago are now dead". You would tweak the numbers to be factual but something like that makes sense to me.
If you only keep the samples you started out with, of course it's going to decline over time. The data is guaranteed to not grow since nothing is ever added.
The internet is dying. Everyone knows it. Capitalists ruined it and now AI is propping up a decaying corpse.
It is more important to archive things you like if you got the space. Even if you don't plan on using it for a long time.
The content isn't significantly disappearing. It is being consolidated and monetized.
Yeah, just like most material that was ever printed or carved into a clay tablet. It's the way of things.
The difference is that most of that content lasted for at least a few decades, if not centuries before being lost to time. As content on the internet is 'destroyed' if no one hosts it any more, a lot of valuable content is being lost in just a few years after being created. Archiving needs to be more widespread and better supported if the resources and culture of the internet as it has evolved over time are to be preserved for posterity.
That's pretty interesting. It looks like they define inaccessible links as urls that get a 404 or the server doesn't resolve.
I wonder if there are any real implications of this. We seem to know it and work around it in some cases, e.g. StackOverflow saying answers need to contain quotes from pages they reference.
I believe it's often because nobody does their own website anymore but instead uses managed services, e.g. Medium. Or bits of information, that would've been worth a blog post some while ago, end up on sites like StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.. And once these services want to monetise these contents, they usually start with limiting public access.
And OTOH TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are doing everything they can to further limit people's attention spans and get them addicted to those services. So the people capable of and/or interested in producing proper "content" are dwindling, too.
If Ian's shoelace site dissapears, I'ma bounce too.