From: slimvirgin@gmail.com On 3/26/06, Keith D. Tyler keith@keithtyler.com wrote:

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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!