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Comment by phy6 | Hacker News Reader

If I were running Wikipedia, I would make some effort to programmatically archive online citations, like archive.org does. Imagine some government persona mis-tweets something that leads to article-worthy historical consequences; if twitter deletes the tweet, can that person sue to have it removed from wikipedia because it made her/him look bad, on the basis that the original citation link doesn't work?

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There is actually already an ongoing collaboration between Wikipedia and Internet Archive to snapshot almost every single web page to Wayback Machine as soon as they are referenced on any Wikipedia site:

https://blog.archive.org/2018/10/01/more-than-9-million-brok...

The pages are being archived at a rate of 20 million URLs/week.

PS. This is not free. Internet Archive is one of those great online institutions that needs a steady stream of donations to buy the hardware that keeps the project going.

What's going to happen when someone like this professor decides to swing the GDPR hammer at Internet Archive to get the rotted page purged first?

I think thats why archive.is exists. They do not act on deletion requests iirc.

GDPR applies to EU-citizens, so I think if the Internet Archive contains material referencing an EU citizen they would need to comply.

How does the EU can enforce anything over an organization that does not have a legal presence in the EU? At best they can force their ISPs to block the website in their countries, but I can't see how much more they can do.

They don't - OP is incorrect in their understanding of GDPR.

I believe archive.org does have a physical presence in Amsterdam, which may not help in this context.

I think this is the main concern here. The link for the source isn't available anymore, therefore the claim stands without anyone to be able to honestly argue against it. Should someone with poor moral and enough reach wanted to have something removed legally from wikipedia or any other such website, they would 'just' have to take down any other online source. In the age of the internet and knowledge being available 24h, this is concerning.

They already programatically replace reference URLs with links to archive.org for those URLs.

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