[WikiEN-l] Dealing with disappearing online sources

[nsk]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:23 +0000, wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
> From: Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>
> multiple references to a website
> that has disappeared
> Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is
> (with a
> note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or
> replace the links with archive.org links?

I, for one, would say that yoy should just do what you would do with
offline sources, there is no reason to treat online sources in a
different way: when you cite a journal it is the reader's responsibility
to go and find it in a library, not yours, as long as you give all
necessary information to locate a copy of the journal if one exists at
all, and if the journal goes out of print and all libraries of the world
somehow decide to burn all copies of that journal then it is still not
your responsibility, as an author or editor.

A dead link is like a book which is out of print.  It is hard to find,
but it was published someday, so it is appropriate to cite it as long as
you include the access date (a short quotation would help too).

Your responsibility as an author is to provide proper references that
would enable one to spot the source if copies exist and to provide the
information in a correct manner (eg if the source says "a bit of it"
don't write "lots of it").  For links, as long as you cite the pages for
information that is correct and truthful and you provide proper
citations (URL, access date, etc) then you have done what is expected of
you.  Noting that a link is dead or providing a link to a web archiver
is a good thing, too.

There are some systems where you can go and keep a snapshot of a webpage
for future reference.  Using them is a good thing, but not necessary:
when you reference a book you don't make a snapshot of it, so you
shouldn't be required to take snapshots of webpages just because
webpages may go dead (books can be burned or become out of print, too).

However, do note that placing citations to dead webpages, or to live
webpages that soon afterwards go dead, is a way to commit undetectable
vandalism.  There is no easy solution against this, unless one is
willing to not include any dead links.

Furthermore, the responsibilities of the author have to be balanced with
the rights of the reader: the reader has a right to be able to check
your work for accuracy, and citations are supposed to satisfy that
right, but with the web this system appears to be broken now (with books
and journals it was very unlikely for a paper source to disappear from
all over the world and from all libraries at once), so one could say
that dead links do not appear to be very useful for readers,
particularly those not familiar with citation systems.  While the author
has a responsibility to provide sources and assist one in finding them
by providing proper publication and access dates or other information,
they are not responsible for actually keeping a copy of them or of
actually finding them themselves after an article is written, but the
reader has a right to be able to check the author's accuracy and
therefore the volatility of the web appears to be a diservice to
readers.

Perhaps the best solution would be to build a web archiving platform in
Wikipedia itself, so that all referenced webpages are stored for later
retrieval.

-- 
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/