[WikiEN-l] Original research

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: slimvirgin at gmail.com
> On 3/26/06, Keith D. Tyler <keith at keithtyler.com> wrote:
>> 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!