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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

What else do you want them to reference?

The Internet Archive at least since it'll keep a URL alive and consistent a lot longer.

At least plain URLs can be manually passed to the internet archive for a lookup, but I'd love if publishers/authors made a habit of maintaining their source links (via shortlinks, published errata, etc).

That said, even with how easy it is to update, Wikipedia suffers from this immensely. I can't count how many times I've tried to track back a source from a wiki and end up with a 404.

That rests on the assumption that IA will outlast everything else, which is unresasonable, if nothing else because, while it may be supported by the community, when Kahle becomes unavailable to the project for one reason or the other, there's no saying what will really happen to it.

The IA has well over 100 employees, possibly over 200 at this point. With a very strong mission statement, I have to imagine they have a very good culture dedicated to Brewster’s goals. I’m sure he’ll choose a very good successor. I’m sure he’s already taken considerable steps to codify his mission into a charter. He’s a very smart guy and he’s worked too hard to allow his vision to falter when he retires.

Furthermore, archivist is a full blown profession with its own professional society. I’m sure IA will always be able to hire people who are serious about preserving and cataloguing information.

I'm curious who it's going to be and what field his successor will come from. As a coder/developer with an MLIS + a decade of library experience, in my experience there aren't that many people who grok both the tech and the politics/people aspect around preservation, which you would need to head IA.

I wouldn't be shocked if, if IA is around in a few decades, they start expanding into educational partnerships to ensure the vision continues. Or institute fellowships. Or they may just inspire more people; IA's work was one of the things that convinced me to pursue an MLIS (as a girl, I was discouraged at the time from CS). Or we'll start seeing more degree specializations that mesh the two, like HCI concentrations.

> I can't count how many times I've tried to track back a source from a wiki and end up with a 404.

Yes, that's really frustrating. I often have the situation where I click on a reference for a claimed fact and get redirected to the front page of a news website.

Typical citation formats have a date referenced so you're free to try that yourself.

WebCite [1] was built for this in the past, but using archive.org is a better idea nowadays. Save a copy of the webpage to the archive if it doesn't already exist and link to it.

Has the added advantage that anyone who goes to the link sees exactly what you saw when you linked to it, with no modifications.

[1]: https://www.webcitation.org/

"Perma.cc helps scholars and courts create permalinks of the web sites they cite" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10948033>

I think a service like webcitation is better because

1. Archive.org follows robots.txt rules - also used to remove content on request from owners (not sure if still do but I suppose they do) making it less sure than webcitation.

2. webcitation could also provide other services like - export citations for book or collections of books into one book of citations.

3. Similar citations tracking stuff that you can get on google scholare, how many other publications were citing this text or part of this website.

on edit: obviously this is if webcitation or a similar service was still a going concern, pragmatically yes archive.org is better because functioning and taking new content to archive.

The only reason I recommneded archive.org is that webcite is no longer taking submissions, and their HTTPS cert has expired. Other than that, I agree with you.

Personally I would save a copy in a standard format and make it available on a domain I control. I've done that in the past for scientific publications.

That's only possible if you own the material, otherwise you may be distributing copyrighted content.

Honestly? Go through the trouble and ask the author for a license to print the relevant parts along with the referencing material.

The most egregious cases is when the author references their own web content!

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