[Foundation-l] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive

[Nikola Smolenski]

On 08/24/2010 03:57 PM, emijrp wrote:
> I want to make a proposal about external links preservation. Many times,
> when you check an external link or a link reference, the website is dead or
> offline. This websites are important, because they are the sources for the
> facts showed in the articles. Internet Archive searches for interesting
> websites to save in their hard disks, so, we can send them our external
> links sql tables (all projects and languages of course). They improve their
> database and we always have a copy of the sources text to check when needed.

I wanted to suggest this for a long time. I see two more reasons for this:

- We are often copying free images or text from various sites (for 
example flickr but other ones too). It happens that these sites go 
offline or change their licenses later. Having such an archive, archived 
by an independent organization, would be indisputable proof of copyright 
status.

- Wikipedia often writes articles about current events, and these link 
to various news organizations as sources. It happens sometimes that 
these sources stealthily change their content for various reasons. Such 
an archive, if it would be able to quickly follow Wikipedia's new links, 
would be a strong deterrent against this Orwellian trend.