[WikiEN-l] SOS -- Save Our Sources

[Steve Bennett]

On 12/3/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at 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