54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
My impression was/is that over the last years/decade Wikipedia made efforts to/switch to not linking directly but extending direct links with (dated) Web Archive links or using Web Archive links directly (dated as "sourced from this in this state; which protects against upstream edits too).
The Web Archive "Wayback Machine" is a project from archive.org, which does much more in archiving and accessibility efforts. An alternative service for websites is https://archive.ph/.
Yes. And wikis, too.
We (people in general) have a tendency to share stuff in forums, like Lemmy. That's fine in the short term, but in the long term this stuff should be sorted, organised, and preferably mirrored. Wikis are perfect for that, while the internet archive is more like "bulk" storage.
Wikis are not really a defense against this issue, they are by nature a secondary or (occasionally by policy) a tertiary source of information. Once the source they are recording dies so does the value of that page on the wiki. From the OP:
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
There's nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they're collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it's just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.
And I believe that they could help a lot with this issue if people migrated/copied meaningful info from forums (like Lemmy) to wikis. Forums are good for discussion, but they tend to accumulate a lot of trash; having the good content sieved and sorted in a wiki makes it more accessible for everyone.
There’s nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they’re collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it’s just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.
This is an accurate point. Thanks for the correction. I think what I should have said is that the biggest one has that policy and, as a result, there is a trend of others following suit.
This is why Discord is poison to our shared pool of knowledge, it's such a black hole for many games and software (especially ironically enough open source projects) in lieu of decent docs.
The worst part is, after wasting a bunch of time tracking down the correct Discord server to ask a question about a piece of software, you generally get lambasted by the "regulars" of that server to "just use the search feature, that's what it's for!"
Yeah, no. I don't want to wade through a reverse chronology of a bunch of conflicting back-and-forth conversations - just gimme a FAQ or some actual documentation!!!
And now with Google regurgitating a summary of the content they've crawled there will be no incentive to publish because no one will click through to get ad payments.
I started a home server on an RPI running some services with a dinky HTML page on it, I need to start actually posting to it. I'm already not on fb or Twitter or anything, if you want to know what I'm doing go to my homepage loser! 🤣
I can give you its name too: End of the World, Part 1 and End of the World Part 2. It was a basically a Final Fantasy clone/attempt that I thought when I was younger was pretty good. Can't remember much about what made it unique though aside from a hidden stick figure fight right outside the castle.
Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted.
I've read this is a major problem in Facebook as well, they lack good moderation for these languages and especially the Arabic script and so just remove things heavy handedly to be safe.
The biggest crime against shared knowledge ever committed is photobucket fucking off with the pictures in every "how to fix this car problem" forum post.
There’s some old Reddit posts like this too. Advice threads where the person who posted a solution went back and overwrote their comments during the boycott last year. I know why they did it but we still lost some information in the grand scheme of things.
And that is why I criticized the decisions every time I read about it. Every time I got mixed responses but ultimately got a higher downvote ratio.
Also a reason I participate(d) in the archive warrior reddit project.
pewresearch.org
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