I have an idea. How about, from now on, every time any of us uses a web source, we save the page so that it'll be around in the future? Not necessarily making this a policy, or a guideline, but a Really Good Idea. Once it goes off the Internet, we will still have it for at least our own use. Or how about a Library of Congress-esque things for websites, where identified websites are selectively archived so they can exist for eternity (as opposed to Wayback Machine which seems to work as randomly picking pages). On 1/2/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 02/01/07, James Hare <messedrocker(a)gmail.com> wrote: Already in progress, in various forms... several national libraries are slowly kicking "online legal deposit" (or something similar) into place, and many countries have fiddled the copyright laws to permit it. (Denmark is the only one I know of fully up and running, but the system is getting there) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Sorry, I should have been more clear. My thought was that, when linking to a page, it might be worth checking first whether archive.org has a copy and, if so, linking to that version. Your second comment is interesting. An argument could be made that Wikipedia represents a selection of the more useful pages on the Internet, and I wonder whether the folks at archive.org have considered this at all. It is worth contacting them? Jake On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 20:01 +0100, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 18:08:22 +0100, Andrew Gray &lt;shimgray(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Actualy I don't think they physicaly get the data untill 6 months have passed. The founder of the archive explained this in a interview with Nerd TV[1]. Basicaly back in the day they started Alexa and the Internet Archive at the same time. Alexa was for profit and the archive is non-profit, and they had a contract between the two that once Alexa was "done" with the data they collected (6 months delay to take the "commercial edge" off it) it was handed over to the Internet Archive. Alexa have since changed ownership, but the contract to supply data to the archive remains in effect, so untill 6 months have passed it's actualy Alexa, not the Internet Archive that have that data as I understand it. 1: <http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/004.html> P.S. To increase the odds of a particular page getting archived (with the caveant that some sites may include no-archive directives in theyr robots.txt or meta HTML haders, such sites are not archived) visit it with a browser that have the Alexa toolbar installed (yuck) or use Internet Explorer (yuck) and choose Tools -> What's related (or some such), wich will also cause Alexa to crawl the page as I understand it (they supply that feature, dunno if it's in IE 7), or just put the url into the form at <http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters/#crawl_site> -- [[:en:User:Sherool]]