On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote: > And the mention of data preservation made me wonder as well. I would > hate to see things like Google Groups eventually vanish or become less > useful. You mentioned Flickr briefly as well, saying it is (still) > neglected by Yahoo. And you said the Geocities shutdown was > "shockingly abrupt".
Yes, it was pretty abrupt. See Jason Scott on this issue and how it wasn't even announced but buried in some obscure Yahoo documentation entry. > One of the most depressing thing about the internet is dead links > (despite some archival services). > > And then I got to thinking how long www.gwern.net will survive for? :-) Depends; I hope to maintain it indefinitely and it's pretty cheap. I am interested in archiving and have my own strategies implemented (see http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs ), since I gave up trying to work with WMF & IA on archiving* and looked into what I could do as an individual. * I was very pleased to see that one of this year's Summer of Code projects was an archive plugin, but I will believe it when I see it running on the English Wikipedia. They already work to some extent; for example, you can see most of gwern.net is already in the Internet Archive ( http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gwern.net/* ) and many pages are in WebCite (eg. http://webcitation.org/627QAJ3KL ). I provide the source repository, so if anyone ever cloned it, it is available that way too. (HTML dumps of gwern.net periodically go into my personal backup harddrive.) > [Moving from the corporate level of the web to the personal level] > > Do you think the collections of blogs hosted by the WMF will survive > longer than various other blogs and blogging sites? > > Or even the archives of the WMF mailing lists. Yes. WMF is corporatizing, and that inherently means stuff will survive longer than personal fly-by-night blogs. If nothing else, those mailing list and blogs are relatively small - Google Groups and Usenet is *huge*. If the Archive Team had to rescue those, I doubt they would be able to retrieve any but a small fraction even with a long lead time. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
