From: slimvirgin(a)gmail.com
On 3/26/06, Keith D. Tyler <keith(a)keithtyler.com> wrote:
What happens if I use as a reference a website
that has
disappeared in
the time since I added the information? It then becomes unverifiable.
Presumably the info, like the website it was sourced from, must
disappear?
Keith, for any source you use, you should leave a full citation in the
References section. See [[WP:CITE]]. That way, if your source is on
the Web and disappears, others may still be able to find it (if, say,
it was a published article that was posted online). However, if you're
using material that exists only on the Web, and the website disappears
completely, then you've lost your source, and the material in the
article goes back to being unsourced. For that reason, and also to do
with the likely quality of the source, I'd say it's best to avoid
relying on material that exists only on one or two websites.
Sarah
I'm _starting_ to make a habit of checking
http://www.archive.org at
the time whenever I insert any Web reference that I would hate to
lose. It's actually quite easy: just prefix
http://web.archive.org/
web/*/ to the address, e.g.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://
en.wikipedia.org .
Unfortunately the
archive.org site is a) incomplete, b) often very
slow, and c) sometimes doesn't do a good job of preserving the
appearance of entire web pages.
Nevertheless, _if_
archive.org has the page, then one of their links
(e.g.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021130190725/www.wikipedia.org/ )
can be a stable link. Provided, of course, that
archive.org itself
remains stable!