Forum:CT Archive/Wookieepedia:Sourcing - Permanent archival links

At the March 2016 Mofference, we amended Sourcing to require that a permanent archival link be added to all citation templates referencing external links. Rule 9 of WP:S currently reads: ''When citing an external link, a permanent archival link must also be included in the citation template if available. WebCite is recommended for this purpose.'' However, I've begun to notice a limitation in WebCite's service that makes it inferior to Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, here is the Random House Kids product page for The Phantom Menace Golden Book. Like many product pages, this page includes a feature where you can toggle back and forth between the book's different editions, in this case hardcover and eBook. The problem with this type of feature, though, is that the toggle feature doesn't work on archived pages. The WebCite archive of this page is a jumbled mess that is very difficult to read. Worse, it doesn't even show the eBook's unique data, even when you enter its specific URL into the archive. Best-case scenario, you would end up having to use a different reference note for each book's edition just to be able to enter a different archive link into your citation template. Obviously, this is not ideal.

On the other hand, observe Wayback Machine's beautiful archive of this page. Everything is neatly arranged, and it cuts through the toggle feature, allowing you to use one reference note in your article for every book's edition. Just to show this principle in action a second time, here is the Penguin Random House product page for this same book, which uses a similar toggle feature. Here is the WebCite archive, which doesn't allow you to access the info from both editions; and here is the Wayback Machine archive, which allows you to see the page's full information.

Whereas WebCite can only do one thing (save a permanent archive of a live web page), Wayback Machine does that plus allows you to access past versions of a web page, even long-dead pages, which is why we've been using Internet Archive for everything with the exception of this WP:S rule. There's really no reason to use WebCite at all, unless Wayback Machine can't save a live page. See the "Save Page Now" section of the WM homepage, where it says this feature is "Only available for sites that allow crawlers." That's the one scenario I can imagine where WebCite can actually do something that Wayback Machine cannot.

Therefore, I'd like to propose revising this rule to state that Wayback Machine should be used as standard, unless there's a case where the Save Page Now feature doesn't work, in which case WebCite will be our backup alternative. The second sentence of Rule 9 will now read:

'''Use Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for this purpose. If Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature does not work for a specific case, use WebCite instead.'''

Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 12:50, April 25, 2017 (UTC)

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 * 1) Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 12:50, April 25, 2017 (UTC)