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Ghostarchive[edit]

I could not think of a better place to post this: Am I the only one who finds Ghostarchive a little shady? I'm worried that we are mass linking to a website with no identified owners or supporting organization, and whose only contact form seems to be its tumblr account.

Contrast that with the Wayback Machine, which is hosted by the Internet Archive or perma.cc, which is maintained by the Harvard Law School library.

This is not only an "optics" problem: I'm concerned about the long-term stability of such a website and its ability to meet our WP:COPYLINK requirements, which anonymous websites don't have a good track record of doing. JBchrch talk 11:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@JBchrch: And archive.today doesn't suffer from the same problems? We have over a million or two links to that site, and we do not know who owns archive.today. And we knew who owned Webcite and look where it is now.
I personally think that as long as the site does the job (archiving links), it doesn't matter who owns it. We link to a whole bunch of sources here, and I am sure we do not know the owner of many of those sites. You state anonymous websites don't have a good track record of staying up, but didn't provide any examples?
Alternate archive sites are not replacements for the Wayback machine, they supplement the Wayback machine. GreenC said that Wayback has more, a lot more, than any other provider. and it will stay that way for the foreesable future. However there are many sites the Wayback machine can't archive. Just today someone contacted me regarding a dead link that had a broken archive on Wayback, but a working one on archive.today. Many of these ghostarchive links are Youtube archives, which no other archive can handle properly. The wayback machine has very recently trying to fix their Youtube archiving capability, but it has a long way to go I think. Internet Archive is preparing to archive about 9000 Youtube videos a day from all Wikimedia properties, which is good i guess.
I spoke to someone working at the IA, who said they aren't even going to work on Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin archiving. Ghostarchive and Archive.today are doing all three of those sites. I use all three sites quite heavily, they have their own strengths and weaknesses. It's about using the right tool for the job. Also i think this a better place for WP:LINKROT talk page where the archive guys hang out. Rlink2 (talk) 15:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2 Just to clarify, the reference to anonymous websites was only in relation to COPYLINK, not the ability to stay up. JBchrch talk 15:58, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Archive provider loss is a real problem. In the past few years we have lost 5. One lesson from WebCite is you can kind of predict ahead of time: site goes down often, lacks support, no new features, bugs not fixed, etc.. By comparison, Archive.today and Ghost appear well attended. Also of the five, 4 were conscientious to arrange moving before they shut down ie. Pandora, Europa Archives, Proni Web Archives, Collections Canada. These were institutional. That leaves WebCite as the outlier case, but also most similar to Ghost and Archive.today as an anonymous one-person provider. It is a problem of "who watches the watchers". It might be as simple as a best-practice that any archive at Ghost have a backup at another provider, or some other arrangement to ensure against total loss of Ghost. The newer the provider, the shorter estimated lifespan it will have. -- GreenC 03:39, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The couple of times in the last week that I have come across a ghostarchive link with Firefox (under Win10/64; FF95.x and 96, with several extensions) I have got "ReplayWeb.page could not be loaded due to the following error: SecurityError: The operation is insecure." Another browser (Brave) works. My response is to replace these links with the Wayback Machine, if available, saying why in the summary. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 22:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Can you try in incognito mode to verify it's not a plugin? -- GreenC 22:33, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Pol098: Have you tried clicking on the "archived page not working?" thing on the side bar? That usually works, at least for me. Rlink2 (talk) 23:55, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2:@GreenC: Private mode doesn't make any difference as I have the plugins enabled in that mode, but I tried it on a Win7/32 virtual machine with a Firefox without extensions. Same error. I clicked on the "archived page not working?" thing on the side bar, and the page then did load. I still think this behaviour is completely unacceptable. It's not just the cumbersomeness and extra click; anyone who comes across it is likely to give up in frustration rather than look at the sidebar. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 00:31, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Pol098: SecurityError: The operation is insecure sounds to me like you are not on the HTTPS version of the site, make sure the beginning begins with https:// and not http://. Anyway, if I encountered any given website and it doesn't load, and there is a very visible link saying "click here if the site doesn't work", I would click on it before giving up. Archive.today also has issues with not working with certain DNS providers if I recall. Rlink2 (talk) 00:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm writing as an editor, not a reader; I have no particular interest in opening the archived link, but in making Wikipedia work for everyone. My posting here is not a request for help but a bug report. If the link is http:// where it should be https://, whoever inserted it is at fault. My view was and is (unless this issue is fixed so that the link opens when clicked in any browser without the reader needing to do anything) that ghostarchive links should be replaced where possible by Wayback ones. I've done a couple. By the way, I didn't notice the sidebar note "click here if the site doesn't work" (my reaction was "this doesn't work properly, it needs fixing" rather than "how can I read this page"). I would expect a lot of people would just give up without reading the small print. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 11:16, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Pol098: making Wikipedia work for everyone is one of my biggest goals as well, it drives everything I do.
FWIW, I was able to reproduce the issue after searching the error string on Duckduckgo. You need to have "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" in settings turned off. It was off in my Firefox by default, so you must have set it on manually. Rlink2 (talk) 13:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2: Good detective work/debugging; I do indeed always set cookies to delete in Firefox. I'd still call this an error, and unacceptable - I'm surely not the only person to delete cookies - in particular, it happens during a session without closing the browser, but even at the beginning of a session it's not OK (links archived with other archivers don't do this). If I were trying to resolve the issue I'd contact the ghostarchive people with a bug report; as it is I avoid ghostarchive. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 14:22, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Pol098: Each site is different, there will always be a very small amount of people that can't access any given site on the internet. Like i said before, there are people that can't click on archive.today links because of the DNS issue either. Some people avoid archive.today for the same reasons. And even archive.org doesn't work in certain browsers and configs. What matters is that the links work for 99.99% of readers and editors, which it seems to do. And if the links don't work, there is something on the sidebar to help those few. Rlink2 (talk) 14:50, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2: While I don't post every archive link, I also try to archive the same page on other archive sites, so even if one link goes down or one can't access it, there are other archive sites with the same material. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:08, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@WhisperToMe
That makes sense, I think that's the perfect approach. Archive.today or similar could one day just go down with all of the data lost, so having the data on multiple archive sites is critical. We already lost one archive "just like that" which was Webcite. But again, Wikipedia or Archive.org could disappear tomorrow too (highly unlikely but possible)
Archive.org's mission is more of "save forever", and the other archive sites' mission is more of "save for an indefinite period of time".
Archive.today can not archive Youtube videos, leaving ghostarchive.org and archive.org as the two ones I know can do Youtube. Sites like Facebook and Instagram do not work with archive.org either, but do work on the other two sites. So for many sites it is either archive.today, ghostarchive.org, or no archive at all. Rlink2 (talk) 18:38, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2: For PDFs I find megalodon.jp works very well as an archiver, so I use that and the Wayback Machine to have two archives of PDFs. Then I can archive the respective Google Cache through archive.today, so there's a copy of the raw text in that one. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@WhisperToMe
I didn't know megalodon.jp can archive PDFs, thanks for letting me know. Ghostarchive can also do PDFs, https://ghostarchive.org/archive/dSvw5?wr=true for example.
Ghostarchive uses webrecorder technology that runs scripts in a sandbox. You can see the difference here on online graphing calculator:
This is just a example, there exist sites that only work with archive.org and sites that only work with archive.today
It is good that you care about linkrot it is an very important issue. There are also other nice archive sites like archive.st, freezepage, etched.page.
You rekindling this discussion today is ironic, because one of my favorite Youtube videos was recently removed and I found out today (luckily, I had archived it). Rlink2 (talk) 22:31, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2: You're very welcome! Link rot is one of the biggest issues on Wikipedia and I work every day to try to combat it, but it's very frustrating. I would like to get in touch with the Webcitation people to try to get them to put the links back up, as there are some pages which I could at the time only archive there, and I want to double-archive those pages. I wish we had bots or other systemic efforts to auto-archive stuff put on here. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:26, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@WhisperToMe
Link rot is one of the biggest issues on Wikipedia and I work every day to try to combat it, but it's very frustrating. Yes, I try my best to combat link rot, some like my work some don't. But i think overall linkrot prevention is a net gain and everyone stands to benefit.
Theres a couple of other great editors on here working on linkrot. GreenC, cyberpower, whoop whoop pull up, brownhairedgirl, and you, are ones that come to mind.
. I would like to get in touch with the Webcitation people to try to get them to put the links back up, as there are some pages which I could at the time only archive there, and I want to double-archive those pages. Appreently, GreenC (works at archive.org) there are some webcite pages archived at archive.today, which could be useful for finding a dead page. Regarding webcite itself GreenC said There is still some thread of hope, but what he's attempting to do, will take time and money he has to raise..
I wish we had bots or other systemic efforts to auto-archive stuff put on here. Me too, at the very least a bot that archives all the references on new articles created would be nice. I do archive refs on new articles manually from time to time, and I get edit thanked quite a bit for it. I know of people that would support such a bot. Rlink2 (talk) 23:51, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@GreenC: To combat archive loss I try to archive the same links on several archives, so even if one goes down, there are at least one or two other copies. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:16, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are links to open-source projects not allowed?[edit]

When I was editing the Language identification article, I saw a warning message:

No red links or linkspamming. This article is not a free license for you to spam or advertise your software on this subject, or any other. Entries will be promptly removed, and repeat offenders will be blocked from further editing.

I'm not sure if I understand this warning message: are editors of this article strictly forbidden from adding external links to open-source projects? Jarble (talk) 15:41, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That was posted in 2016. Never saw it again until you just mentioned it. In retrospect the wording and the page it applies to may not be correct or fully warranted as posted, so it has been removed. -- Alexf(talk) 15:58, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a statement about Wikipedia:List selection criteria, which is internal links rather than external links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:46, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Jarble: the message is old and has been removed, but some comments from my side. We do have criteria on what is put into a list. Either they are 'complete' (which for lists of products or lists of companies is generally impossible), or they need to 'have a reason' to be in the list. For some pages that means that if the item is not notable in Wikipedia terms (i.e., it does not have an own article) that you need a reference that is reliable/significant, and that is totally independent of the 'item' (not some blog post by someone mentioning the product, not some article in a mainstream journal that has a fleeting mention of the product, not a mainstream journal article written (or asked to be written) by someone who is involved in the production of 'item'. For some articles we go a step further, and we do not include anything that does not have an independent Wikipedia article (i.e., no redlinked items, hence no items that have no independent notability). I think the last option is what is meant here. We have these rules to avoid spamming of anything else (basically enforcing WP:SOAPBOX #4/#5). Dirk Beetstra T C 06:09, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Beetstra: The message was about external links. Does Wikipedia have a notability requirement for external links as well as lists? Jarble (talk) 06:27, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Jarble: that is basically the same. We do not create lists of external links, we do not create lists with 10 bluelinks and 1 external link to avoid the redlink, etc. WP:ELLIST has some more information. And we do not put links to individual products in the external links sections, nor making sentences like 'Also [www.thiscompany.com thiscompany] makes this product'. Dirk Beetstra T C 08:02, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Museum Folkwang[edit]

Hi, I just noticed that many of our external links to the Museum Folkwang site and its associated pages for artworks are broken due to a website update they did in the recent past. How do I go about requesting a bot to fix all of these links? Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 21:29, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Viriditas: on the botreq page (user:GreenC, is this also approved for your bot?). Dirk Beetstra T C 06:59, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Kurzgesagt[edit]

A new user recently added an external link to a Kurzgesagt video to Great Filter and was subsequently reverted. However, WP:YOUTUBE provides some leeway for this link. Is this site appropriate for Wikipedia? Should I be asking this question on the reliable source noticeboard instead? I’m trying to create a paper trail for discussion about Kurzgesagt as an external link/reliable source, because I haven’t been able to find any past discussion on the subject. I have no real feelings on it either way, but it should be discussed so that if it comes up again, we can link to some kind of consensus on the matter. Thanks. Viriditas (talk) 22:50, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Viriditas: you are talking about this edit I presume. I am unconvinced that the link should be in the external links section, and unsure whether it should be added to the linkfarm of further reading. It may be a good reference, but that is another question. The revert was for ‘unreliable source’, but this was not a source in the first place.
I would argue that we do not link to youtube, but to https://kurzgesagt.org/portfolio/why-alien-life-would-be-our-doom/ anyway. Again, maybe as a proper reference (and if that is being questioned an RSN discussion may be of interest), but not just ‘dumped’ into an EL section for every article where it may be of interest. Dirk Beetstra T C 06:57, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I watched the video. I liked it, until it got to the advertisement at the end.
But I don't think that it clears WP:ELNO#EL1. It provided nothing beyond what should already be in the article. The only difference is that it's a video. It's possible that some day editors will decide that "same stuff, but in video" is a valid reason for an external link, but right now, that's on the generally unwanted list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:58, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Totally agree with WithwhatamIdoing above. David J Johnson (talk) 12:44, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I also agree with this. The EL shouldn't be tossed for being a YouTube video necessarily, but because it does not provide a unique resource (WP:ELNO). SWinxy (talk) 23:20, 23 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How do I link to artwork at Kunsthalle Bremen?[edit]

Over at Camille (Monet), at the bottom of the page, I have a link to the painting in the collection of Kunsthalle Bremen. Here is what the link looks like:

http://www.artefact.kunsthalle-bremen.de/1/webmill.php?fx=g&id=27222&foldertype=auto&foldergroup=irc&ditem=4848&dmodule=501&lin=detail

When I click on it on mobile, I don’t see anything except a blank collection page. If I go back into the site and search for the painting, it will show, but any attempt to use this URL as a static link fails. Can anyone tell me how to create a static link from this URL so it can be used on the Wikipedia entry? Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 21:40, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Viriditas
Strange,the link does not work for me either. It only worked (sometimes) on a specific browser and specfic configuration, I tried everything else and it didn't work.
Sometimes, when you archive, it stores the copy. I tried the archiving website discussed right above us and it seems to work: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/GUndp?wr=true . The image sometimes disapeears and comes back as well, so at least with the archive it will be accessable. Rlink2 (talk) 13:47, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I don’t know if someone from the museum is reading this or not, but there’s now a static page available for the entry:
https://www.artefact.kunsthalle-bremen.de/sammlung/sammlungshighlights/claude-monet/text/
I’m not sure why this suddenly appeared. It’s very possible that I tried to link to the wrong page in the first place. Viriditas (talk) 22:57, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220407010735/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links/Noticeboard

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