On 12/3/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I've seen it happen and I'm pretty sure it continues to happen. Sometimes websites disappear. Not that uncommon on the web, but it can be disastrous for Wikipedia articles when those sites happen to be the source for an article. I think there should be an organized effort to have pages for uncommon sources cached and to replace dead links with their archived counterparts. Is there such an effort yet?
I believe we should also have a way of making dead-tree sources available (through scans etc) for verification. Currently, we don't seem to have any way of uploading a scan of a page or whatever, simply for the purpose of verification. It wouldn't be for inclusion in the article itself, and possibly restricted to logged in users, but I would have thought this would easily satisfy "fair use".
The same mechanism should apply for web pages, where we can copy the relevant bits of a webpage and store them somewhere in case the website is no longer available. Archive.org is only a partial solution to that - and what if archive.org itself disappears?
Steve