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internetarchive

Why is The Wayback Machine so important for preserving our digital culture? According to new analysis from Pew Research Center:
❌ 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible
❌ 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link
πŸ”— pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024

16 comments
Firecat

@internetarchive software is also disappearing. Anyone remember the original Windows Player? It’s unable to work on windows 10 and Microsoft made it that way. Only a matter of time until Microsoft removes software from XP days.

ManyRoads :cupofcoffee:

@internetarchive This is especially important for those of us who do genealogy research.

Daniel Gibson

@internetarchive
> 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link

LOL - if news websites linked sources etc as much as they should, that would be 100% (unless they already have an automated fallback to archive.org for broken links)

And as someone who has restored a (game modding) Wiki, that suddenly went offline "due to spam" and never came back, from The Wayback Machine: Yes, it's absolutely invaluable.

Lokjo - EU's Gmaps replacement

@internetarchive

With google starting to use AI in their search results I guess you guys will have to ramp up your servers a bit. :)

DonQuixokie

@internetarchive Elective Dark Ages aught to be a Capital Crime. This is the work of the Bush 43 administration. His Legacy. Trump was taught by the best.

Raun Kupiec

@internetarchive

This is significant and worrying considering how little is in print in practice anymore.

Sassinake! - βŠƒβˆͺ∩βͺ½

@internetarchive

"Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

History started when humans started recording things for posterity and wisdom.

Ed Summers

@internetarchive it would've been interesting if they also looked at the missing, to see what was available in a web archive.

skua

@internetarchive
The #LoC #LibraryOfCongress needed to be funded and tasked with maintaining a official #PublicRecord.

skua

@internetarchive
@edsu

Figures given are AIUI low.
Study estimates the percentages of webpages that are known to have existed that now are broken links.

Webpages that existed and have no accessible digital record of existing are not included in this study.

Know if #Wikipedia had #WikipediaDeletedArticles archived for perpetuity? Would be one way to #CoverUpTheBullyingAndAbuse that was (/is?) such a poisonous feature of the culture of a large online community project. Train for online abuse.

πŸ’‘πš‚π—†π–Ίπ—‹π—π—†π–Ίπ—‡ π™°π—‰π—‰π—ŒπŸ“±

@internetarchive
Yeah, I completely lost my first website when the host went down and was never resuscitated. Recently I found my whole website in the Wayback machine (mostly) all still working. :-) Unfortunately it doesn't also save the back-end CGI I wrote (but for obvious reasons). :-(

Carolyn

@internetarchive I think a big mistake is treating the web like a library.

Angela Scholder

@internetarchive Yep, also from the links I put on my websites quite a few are now broken. I've tried to update, but there still will be broken links.

devflow

@internetarchive does the wayback machine preserve a snapshot of google reviews? I find that a lot of times businesses remove bad reviews. It would be very helpful to be able to go back in time to see these bad reviews that were removed.

Peter Motte

@internetarchive Does The Wayback Machine accept html files? In other words: do they have room for websites and webpages?

PhoenixChief

@internetarchive The large language model industy loves the internet achive data sets? What about copyright and data ownership?

Stack overflow questions are okay to be achieved since the answers are in the public domain.[1] en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_

But if a site is bloated trash and the content is locked, please let it die.

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