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Web Pages Are Weak Links in the Chain of Knowledge
PizzaFace writes "Contributions to science, law, and other scholarly fields rely for their authority on citations to earlier publications. The ease of publishing on the web has made it an explosively popular medium, and web pages are increasingly cited as authorities in other publications. But easy come, easy go: web pages often get moved or removed, and publications that cite them lose their authorities. The Washington Post reports on the loss of knowledge in ephemeral web pages, which a medical researcher compares to the burning of ancient Alexandria's library. As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.""
I really think we are living in a world right now of some of the worst record keeping of knowledge.
I've started to keep archivied copies of webpages instead of links, the next time you want it it's gone. Unfortunatly you can't share them like links.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Really, is there a reason to archive everything in the world? Sure, your 4 year old has some pretty drawings, but should they be put in a library someplace?
100 years from now, should anyone be forced to accidentally stumble over goatse? (which is very disturbingly archived on archive.org)
Tell the RIAA that.
Music is a part of our culture.
...which means that with that ISBN I can refer to the book and find it at libraries or bookstores. Why don't we setup a sort of unique web page number if articles of interest or knowledge are published there. Then it would be easy to track an article if its moved to another site or whatever just by looking up a sort of catalog for these numbers.
honestly, the transient nature of webpages makes it an unsuitable medium for the long term establishment of "culture" our categorization happy, buzz-word ridden nature so commonly prevalent will have to find a new term for what is the web. boo-freaking-hoo.. meanwhile i'll keep doing my thing, posting pics for my family to see, putting calendar events up on the web so my homebrew-club will know when we're meeting and not worry about any "culture" i might be potentially creating then destroying when i take stuff back down.
man i need coffee, insomnia is a bitch...
You probably shouldn't be quoting any kind of "Bob's World of Great Scientific Insight" type pages anyway. I mean, the majority of sites that go under in less than 100 days are the one person operations that one should identify as bad sources anyway. So it might seem obvious that quoting someone's blog in a research paper is just a plain stupid idea, but it happens way more often than you might think.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
People are worried about losing the information on the web: but all that is really happening is that the URLs are no good after a while, you lose the snapshot. The information is not necessarily going anywhere. If there is a need or a want, someone will throw it up, or another will host it. That's the beauty of the web, you get the good with the bad, but time has a way of getting rid of the chaff.
;)
What would be interesting would be a website that archives those snapshots for posterity. Well, what do you know, there are several such sites already! Looks like we're in good shape. The sky is not falling.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
It's not just the short lifespan of a webpage... it's also the fact that the source isn't always reliable. Web publications are rarely given the same strict editorial process as most journal articles. The content might be just as good - or better - but they're also not given the same credibility.
I'm a recent grad of a University... my freshman year, profs wanted us to start using the Internet more so we were asked to submit at least x number of references from Internet sources. By my senior year, they were trying to get us to stop using the Internet. Using a URL as a reference was sometimes forbidden by the professor.
That matters in part because some documents exist only as Web pages -- for example, the British government's dossier on Iraqi weapons. ...
"It only appeared on the Web," Worlock said. "There is no definitive reference where future historians might find it." Much like the WMDs themselves then
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
It's called a header redirect, folks. In one line of php, do:
header ("Location: http://www.newsite.com/over_here.html");
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Any extra effort required to make web pages and their URL's preserved for eternity makes it more difficult for people to create them in the first place, which will mean less knowledge available, not more. Something unobtrusive that goes around preserving pages for posterity, like the Internet Archive, is the best soplution.
Energy: time to change the picture.
This is why every time I use a web reference I make a hardcopy of it and include it in my research folder. It did not take long for me to figure out that web pages are no more useful than manufacturer catalogs - once the year is up, you might never get that tidbit of information back. If it's too large to want to print, I'll hardcopy the couple of pages I need, and PDF the whole thing for digital storage.
Having a hardcopy (1) documents the information and it's (purported) source, and (2) allows offline access for comparison and validation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What was the problem again?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
There is no substitute for the printed page... yet.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
besides if you want to see old pages just go the the the wayback machine. Between that and backup tapes, everything you ever wrote still lives (in many cases I wish it didn't !).
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I've personally been working (internally so far) on a website of modern-day Orthodox-Jewish responsa to various issues of Jewish law, so this is an issue I've given some thought to.
To say this is some kind of problem specific to the web is misleading. There are old, well-quoted sources of Jewish thought whose texts are simply lost to us in this current day and age. Example: a famous and extremely popular commentary on the Talmud and Torah, Rashi, is missing for at least a few chapters of Talmud. That would be the equivalent of IEEE misplacing some standards papers and then NO ONE having copies, just lost to the sands of time. Yet it did happen, proving this at least _was_ a serious issue.
However, these days, with such things as the Way-Back Machine and Google caching, actually LOSING entire web pages doesn't happen very often, and, I'd bet, it happens far less frequently than the loss of books.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
While I use the web as a source of information (information which is unavailable in any other format), I would not cite any information unless I can personally verify it. Would you trust "Anonymous Coward" when he tell you to "click this link"? So why would you trust some random website?
I found that out years ago.. :P
:)
From a researcher's perspective, I used the web primarily as a quick "google" to get some ideas on where I might do further research. For instance, while a particular paper may have been taking offline regarding my search, many times the search will proffer an author's name. Take that name to the library's database (or googling it, too), and you might can get a list of more publications that the author has penned. Even better: sometimes, you can get a valid email address from other links and you can write and ask the original researcher himself about various publications, many times they have copies on hand and can send them to you. My research involves the web, but does not end with the web, which is where many people find themselves hung.
Hey, guys. See that big building with those obsolete books? Lots of chicks hang out there.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I don't see how this is news. Most people who write science papers are well aware of the problems with citing web pages, and we'll try to cite books and published papers wherever possible. Generally, people with something important to say will publish it properly, so this is not usually a problem.
The only people who exclusively cite web pages are likely to be the same people who write bad papers anyway, so I can't see the issue here.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen addressed the issue of linkrot in a column already in 1998: Fighting Linkrot.
That was why Tim Berners-Lee wanted URL to stand for ``Universal'' (not Uniform) Resource Locator.
;)
The problem is, few people have formal training as librarians, or understand how to file away a document under such schemes (whether or no pages like this are worth preserving is another issue entirely).
Then there's the technical issue---where's the central repository? Who ensures things are correctly filed? Who pays for it all?
With all that said, I'll admit that I use Google's cache for this sort of thing---it lacks the formal hierarchy, but the search capabilities ameliorate this lack somewhat. It does fail when one wants a binary though (say the copy of Fractal Design Painter 5.5 posted by an Italian PC magazine a couple of years ago).
Moreover, this is the overt, long-term intent behind Google, to be the basis for a Star Trek style universal knowledge database---AI is going to have to get a lot better before the typical person's expectations are met, but in the short term, I'll take what I can get.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is no way to run a culture.
Do we run the culture, or does the culture run us?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Why would we want to archive 99.9% of today's web content ?
Does anyone archive CB radio traffic ??
It's not a permanent storage medium, never could be, too many points of failure between your screen
and the server holding the data.
Anything worth publishing digitally should be recorded in a more permanent medium.
I constantly backup all my digital photos because they are important to me. I also print the best ones for placing in photo albums, distributing to friends, etc.
The website they are published to is just a delivery medium, and not even the primary one. It can disappear and I wouldn't care. People who know me can always get access to them. Scientists should view their work the same way.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Would be much more worried about if the site said the same thing. What about revisionism, I would wonder if the reference cited even said the same thing as what it was cited for, it's easy enough to change the pages so that they can be twisted to make the referencer look stupid (don't like their use of the reference) or to just out and out lie after they get referenced. Unless they are locked down, and we all know that is not really possible, someone somewhere will find their way in.
Printed media, while having a low data/pound ratio, has managed to survive and span generations for centuries. I think the need for paper libraries cannot be forgotten. The challenge is distilling out what is worth keeping, and this challenge is better met now rather than later because we have more or less a good idea of what is significant information, and what is crap.
www.freehaven.net
The ephemeral nature of the web is a very real problem, but it's important not to overstate it. The reason so much more information is lost these days is partly a reflection of the fact that we produce so much more of it. The Library of Alexandria was the distilled knowledge of an entire civilisation; it was unique, irreplaceable and massively important information. The web is full of information that is of low quality, often massively redundant (thousands of pages explain the same thing in different ways) and certainly replaceable (the web is not the final repository of the information: it's a temporary place where that information is published). In the same way, for centuries, newspapers have produced thousands of redundant issues with a lifetime of just a few days. The reason no one decries the loss of our newspapers is because the publishers themselves still archive the information, even if this is somewhat hard to get to. The same is true of web pages, only the number of publishers is vastly larger.
:-)
Individual newspapers had their own ways of making their archives public (in many cases for a fee) because storing that information is a cumulative, ever-increasing cost. On the web that cost is much lower, but still present. In addition, there's the question of relevancy: www.mysite.com/index.html may contact valuable information, relevant enough to be on the front page today, but in a week's time you don't want it to still be there. So what we need is archiving, for the web.
But manual archiving is inefficient and a pain to maintain, since it involves constantly moving around old files, updating index pages, etc.. Plus linkers don't bother to work out where the archive copy is eventually going to be: they link to the current position of the item, as they should.
So what the web needs is automatic archiving. One way to do this (a solution to which was the partial subject of my final year project at uni) is to include additional a piece of additional metadata (by whatever mechanism you prefer) when publishing pages; data that describes the location of the *information* you're looking for, not the page itself. So mysite.com/index.html would contain meta-information describing itself as "mysite news 2003.11.23 subject='something happened today'". User-agents (browsers) when bookmarking this information could make a note of that meta-data, and provide the option to bookmark the information, rather than the location (sometimes you want to bookmark the front page, not just the current story). Those user agents, on returning to a location to discover the content has changed, could then send the server a request for the information, to which the server would reply with the current location, even if that's on another server.
Of course, this requires changes at the client side and the server side, which makes it impractical. A simpler but less effective solution is for the "archive" metadata to simply contain another URL, to where the information will be archived or a pointer to that information will be stored. This has the advantage of requiring only changes to the client-side.
Suggestions of better solutions are always welcome
Personally, I find web links *can* be much more efficient than having to dig out an issue of some science journal (which the local library will *not* have, and your request will be forwarded by carrier snails), if they're there.
But, always the paper reference. If it doesn't have one, it'd sure better be a reference to a known professor somewhere, so whoever is interested can dig up a homepage somewhere. If it doesn't even have that, don't use it.
Personally, I haven't found it that difficult to cite articles and such. Sources of information is a much bigger problem. Like e.g. statistics, or overviews or similar reference material. They are often moved/updated/reorganized/removed and you have no idea about it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The article states that the average life for a website is 100 days, but wouldn't journals and formal publications (the most often cited documents in research) last longer than the average? Also, is the average skewed because websites are more likely to contain 'current information'? "Average lifetime" is misleading, does this mean the average time the page stays the same, or the average time before the information in the page is unavailable?
Given that 99% of the web pages out there would never have been written in the first place, 100 days seems better 0 days doesn't it?
The advantage of a easy-to-use, disposible medium is in the low cost of publishing. But that low cost opens the doors for a things less worthy of writing down in the first place.
Then DOWNLOAD the pages from your web citations.
For example, a short time ago, I did a white paper on power scavenging sources. About 1/2 the articles I read were HTML or PDF sources. Rather than just citing the URL, I downloaded/saved every online article I referenced. If someone wants the source and cannot find it, I'll just provide it to them. If your paper is going to be read by a number of people, it makes good sense to have those sources on-hand; it never hurts to cover your arse.
Hard drive/Network/Optical space is virtually unlimited, so storage isn't a problem. Paper journals are archived by most libraries, anyway, so until they start archiving technical sources, I'm going to have to do my OWN archiving.
One month a thoughtful Microsoft programmer will post the bug on a page with a workaround, source code, and a patch using Visual Studio.
.Net
The next month the bug officially doesn't exist, the workaround page is gone, the source code is who knows where, and it's
If you go to Linux.org though, the FAQ and bug postings are preserved for all to see.
You're right though, in that Microsoft should be identified as one of those bad sources anyway.
That's a fairly reductionist view if taken too far. Not all researchers are tech whizzes (no pun intended), and I've seen a number of, in my case, professors of English Literature who run the same sort of, "Throw up ten pages with Under Construction signs, test publish a few papers, and let the site sit for years, one day to mysteriously disappear," web site lifespan that "Bob's World" might as well.
Perhaps even more interestingly, it doesn't always really matter if you've done great, repeatable research in the "soft science" fields or outright humanities. You don't have to be a literature expect to have a good insight on "Bartleby the Scrivener". A grad student's blog, as an example, might contain excellent contributions to the conversation.
Now that said, in the context of the article -- dealing with "a dermatologist with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Denver" -- I would tend to agree with you heartily. Hard science needs to pull, in my layman's view, from research that the article's author researched well enough to see that it wasn't a few 0's and 1's that might be pulled later, in general.
And heck, what's the harm in saving the pages on your drive and contacting the original author if they disppear? Hard drive space is cheap. If you take yourself seriously, you might want to grab a snap, even if it is technically illegal (not that I know that it is; Google seems to do it right often).
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
May I remind everyone to read and understand TimBL's Cool URI's don't change. It's not that hard to design systems where you do not have to change the URI every 100 days, folks.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Proper URL citations include the date. I'm not worried so much about the page being taken down (since it is presumably archived), as much as changing. If you don't record which version your were referring to, the content can change dramatically.
:w
Each data set (collection) has a handle, suppoosedly longer lasting than URNs. We're talking about long term data storage here.
There's an implementation of it at Cambridge University, and my organisation will be evauluation it as soon as the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server software lands on my desk and I've installed my server.
Tom.
I started posting usenet in the late 1980s. These g*dd*mn things are still are still on the net. I was less guarded at that time. Everyone *knew* them becase disk space ws so scare that usenet postings would disappear in 7-14 days.
I was unaware that a culture needs to be run.
Good record-keeping doesn't necessarily mean keeping everything, just stuff worth keeping.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
...Google will stay.
If the authors are too stupid to include phrases for good search results instead of dead links, I don't need their book.
Information comes and goes. Important things stay.
Hey, I clicked that link and all I got was some discusting picture. I am outraged, now I trust nothing on the web. How dare you take advantage of me like that, I have never heard of such a thing. I had thought that all things on the internet are not only important but true, and now I am not too sure. I hope your happy, Jerk!
I collect miscellaneous links on my web site. Over time, I've started adding excerpts along with links. The excerpts help remind me what the link was about, but they also serve another purpose: when the link goes bad, I can use keywords in the excerpt to search for related pages on the web.
Our knowledge of ancient history has proceeded in a similar manner. Much of what we know about, say, pre-socratic philosophers, we know because of references in Aristotle and other later scholars. The original sources may be totally lost, but at least we have some names and quotations.
-kgj
-kgj
it's not simply webpages that are the problem. it's digital storage in toto.
because we as a generation are quickly moving away from our previous long-lived forms of storage, and toward digital management of archives, it's trivial for someone to decide to unilaterally delete (not backup?) a whole decade of data in some area of our history.
i remember the photographer who found the photograph of bill clinton meeting monica lewinsky 10 years ago. he was in a gaggle of press photographers, but nobody else had this picture because they were all using digital cameras and he was still on film. most of their pictures from that day had been deleted years ago since they weren't worth the cost of storing. but this guy had it on film.
yes. websites are disappearing. but there's a greater problem lurking in the background. the cost of preserving this stuff digitally, indefinately. who's going to pony up the cash for that? unfortunately, no one. and we'll all ultimately pay dearly for that... (hell -- we already have trouble learning from the past.)
Easy come, easy go... here's another cliche: Give and Take. What's great about the web is that it has effectively demolished the barriers to entry in publishing. Everybody and their grandmother has a blog now - you can't compare webpages to magazine articles or newspapers. There's just so much more information being published now that its average lifespan is bound to go down. So what?
Publications that cite [web pages] lose their authorities? Who the hell told you to cite a webpage? Might as well cite a poster you saw downtown. If the webpage is a reputable source in the first place, it'll keep it around permanently. Still better than scientific journals that are squirrelled away in the basements of university libraries - anyone can get to a webpage.
This is no way to run a culture. Last time I checked, nobody ran our culture... It kinda runs itself. The proliferation of accessable, ephemeral webpages over permanent, priveliged paper publications (wah, too many p's!) is a sign that our information culture has moved on into a new era. Liked the old one? Tough! Now information has to maintain its own relevance in order to be permanent... and I for one welcome that change.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
...ever heard about google? Damn I even don't bother to put the link to google here because it's so obvious. ..again.. slashdot "news"
But wait, I think I still have a Mosaic presskit from the '91 Comdex. Does that count?
It's not Web Pages, its the Web itself that will be the cultural artifact. With the bar for publishing on the Internet placed so low, it falls to Father Time to become the Web's ultimate Editor-in-Chief.
On a related note, I'm moving, and came across reams of stuff I wrote while a college student, and boy does it suck! Tonight I light a candle to Neil Gaiman's I-Net God in thanks that my potentially career-wrecking pukage is preserved only in patchouli-smeared folders in my basement and not on a global network of servers. I feel like I've dodged more bullets than Neo; in 20 years when you guys do a vanity-google, I hope y'all feel the same way, but I'm guessing you will have wished the Web was even more forgetful than it is.
Is this an authority actually questioning the validity of the Internet and it's use in research? Or is the authority simply using this as a ruse to say, "read our publication, as the Internet is making it outdated?" I tend to vote for the latter. I've read too much good research on the Internet - valid research - overlooked by the mainstream medical and science community just because it didn't mean more money for someone or didn't fit the status quo.
www.PublishersName.arc/path/articleID/VerNum/
The idea being that files uploaded here are expected to be permanently. Then professors can say urls with *.arc are o.k. for references, and *.RespectedName.arc/* are even better. In the math community, articles from arxiv.org and a few others are generally respected sources. This might not be the case for cultural studies, for example, where there are no central repositories. If there were more and better permanent archiving services, this would be less of a problem. Maybe the government could run such a service?
/oldschema/.htaccess: /oldschema/foobar.html /newschema/quux.html
Redirect permanent
Once recognized a site may deserve preservation.
Web pages that are flat-out wrong and un-moderated are all the better for being ephemeral. I've often wished for a meta-critical facility like slashdot's ranking system for general web pages. This too is problematic, though; sadly, those with the most committment to cruising around the web & instering commentary are rarely the most qualified.
Wikipedia is an interesting example; try looking up a topic you know something about there. Even if you were to spend the considerable time necessary to iron out all of the misconceptions in many of the articles, there is no guarantee that someone won't come along the next day with an ax to grind and undo all your work.
Sorry if this is OT, but highlighting reliable info seems a more pressing issue.
As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."
To the contrary, I think this is highly typical of the culture we have today, where everything is a transient fad in the media, technology and politics.
And it is also self feeding, I think, since market forces need to clear out the old to make room for the new in order to meet sales forecasts and shareholder expectations. And this is very true for pop, news and technology, which explains the lack of staying power of pop icons these days and becomes interesting when you want to ask yourself if you really need that new 3GHz machine just to surf the web.
And it is highly convenient in politics where a politician doesn't have to be accountable for what he said 100 days ago.
And so, the lack of long time life on the web is simply symbolic of all the rest here really, even if it is highly questionable.
secretaries didn't print them out for their PHBs to read and stuff.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Err, which serious medical researcher would cite a web page? Everything remotely reliable, that is, in science at least, peer reviewed, is published in journals. While these may have a web appearance, they are also published in print - and that's what you cite.
This comment does not exist.
..Google and archive.org? Is the knowledge about these two sites gone, too?
Poor humans. Watch MTV and stay informed about everything you're supposed to know.
Use genguid (or other tool) to make a globally unique number
and place that number at the bottom of your
page a link with google's "I'm feeling lucky"
searching for the GUID.
Loss of reference links is worse than having no data.
In law a citation may be relied upon for a judicial ruling. If the citation is valid at the time of the original ruling, but no longer in existance when the case is reviewed on appeal (typically 2-5 years later) then the question of the validity of the precedent cited becomes the issue rather than the authority of the citation. The whole legal construct is built upon stare decisis and if what goes before vanishes into cyber-haze then the usefulness of web citations is nil.
Of course, Westlaw (tm) and Lexis/Nexis (tm) will have redirectors for their pages - but the cost of those services is very, very high. Infrastructure is costly even when the content is copyright free.
Well, I guess we know what Paul McCartney will be doing on the cover of his next album..
Webpages aren't replacements for books. Or rather, you shouldn't use them that way.
If they're lasting on average 100 days, that puts them somewhere between transient culture, like spoken conversation, and printed culture, like newspapers. Big deal.
We want to preserve culture for future generations, no doubt. But we don't want to preserve all culture for future generations. Anything that is lasting for 100 days and isn't being persisted... well, relatively that's not worth much to future culture.
I don't remember the exact saying, but there is a Native American saying to the effect of "We don't write things down. If we don't remember it, it's not worth remembering." Now, they're not the last word (no pun intended) in wisdom traditions, but there is a certain amount of enforced vitality necessitated by forgetting the details.
We'd better get used to the idea. We're only going to be forgetting more and more of the details as we generate more and more useless information.
Then you do a domain name redirect and reconfigure httpd.conf on the new server location. It seems to me that for lack of a little DNS (named.conf) knowledge, the world suffers a great deal. Perhaps that was the point of the original piece.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
guys.. http://www.everything2.org/
how long does it take to relocate?
This is Yet Another Example of how copyright laws are breaking down. If you're going to cite something academically, should you perhaps have the right of mirroring the content you are citing for the sole purpose of providing a backup if the original goes down, or even just changes?
Copyright law says no, that's copyright infringement.
But copyright law is based on the assumption that a published thing, like a book, is concrete and can't be changed, and can be referred to, forever and ever amen, by the same name, page number, etc. This is obviously no longer true. Should copyright law be changed as a result, now that the old idea of "expression" is breaking?
For an extended discussion of this, please see my communication ethics essay, particularly the section on the death of 'expression' (why copyright is totally broken).
URIs don't provide content-based addressing (like a hash of the document). They rely upon trustworthy name registrars, which is an assumption that might have been valid when Berners-Lee was doing his early work, but is not now. They rely on someone willing to continue hosting the original document -- not necessarily the case.
You can link to a article which is then changed by the original publisher (or someone else). With scientific papers, you can't do that -- and such behavior is probably not desireable.
On the up side, if you're currently using cited references, you should be able to build such a system without too much problem -- follow links to PDFs or automatically crawl HTML documents (and check images) and serve all papers that you refer to with your paper. It'd be big, but it provides better reliability than do current paper schemes.
Another feature that might be useful is signing of the content (assuming RSA doesn't get broken in the future).
Basically, if you put up a SHA-1 (Gnutella), MD4 (eDonkey), or similar reference, you can host the original referred-to documents as well as the original host.
If Freenet didn't have as a specific drawback the inability of someone to guarantee that a document remains hosted as long as they are willing to host it, Freenet would be a good choice for this.
One possibility is that, with a bit of manual work, one can frequently find an academic work by Googling for its title. At least for now, as long as you host the original papers as well, Google should pick up on this fact. Of course, it does nothing to prevent modification of that paper by another party...
A good system for handling this would be to have a known system that is willing to archive, in perpetuity (probably hosted by the US government or other reasonably stable, trustworthy source [yes, yes, cracks at the US government aside]). This system would act like a Tier 1 NTP server -- it would only grant access to a number of other trusted servers (universities, etc) that mirror it -- perhaps university systems -- which would keep load sane. These servers (or perhaps Tier 3 servers) then provide public access. Questions of whether there would be a hard policy of never removing content or what would be allowed (especially WRT politically controversial content) would have to be answered.
There could be multiple Tier 1 servers that would sync up with each other, and could act as checks in case one server is broken into. I'm partial to the idea of including a signature on each file, but I suppose it isn't really necessary.
Specific formats could be required to ensure that these papers are readable for all time. Project Gutenberg went with straight ASCII. This would probably have to be slightly more elaborate. Microsoft Word and PDF might not be good choices, and international support would be necessary.
May we never see th
All the mass media is owned by 6 major corperations as we already know. In our stimulation-happy culture where sitting ontop of a mountain taking in the view isn't appreaciated, so too is long complicated writing. Thanks to this media, people are raised to be consumers, and we're stimulated to the point that things like books are so boring that we fall asleep reading them. Why read a book when you can watch a movie? A person who plays FPS games for months on end is so thoroughly stimulated that sitting at a spot and just relaxing may be a bit much for them to do.
And now we've got a bunch of professors complaining about how the culture that has come into being is completly fucking their profession. This is understandable, and if studies were more available in web format they'd be more popular.
The very idea of mass media is very very very wrong. It's a very bad thing for our society. How it used to be is that you'd know what's going on around you by seeing it. Now you've got to trust some news anchor on the television or internet and when they're reporting on some bitch or hoe on tv instead of doing their job of educating people on stuff that's important; do I care some star ran amok and molested his children? No. I do care however when congress decides it wants to take one more step towards turning me and every human on the planet into slaves and if it weren't for that, I wouldn't give a damn. I could just focus on my life and my ideas and be involved with society at my own level. My life would be so much more peaceful if I wasn't afraid of the US turning into a big pile of shit.
It's no wonder in this stimulation happy society of 1-sentance soundbytes and news stories that don't even have paragraphs that people won't pay attention or give credibility to research organizations. If a news agency that was once taught as a credible source of information such as the New York Times is now shit, should I consider other publications such as reuters just as credible? I give more credibility to my friend who heard from their friend who heard from a friend of a friend that xyz was happening than I do to NYT.
A major problem that even hits the intellegent people is that they want to know what's going on too. But to know what's going on it's a 2 hour ordeal every day. You've got to get up, get online, go through your daily checks folder and get your news. wade through the utter crap to get to the good stuff that you want. I'v got to look through 10 headlines of bullshit to find the 1 headline that's good, and read 10 stories on a subject to get an idea of what's going on.
So yes, webpages are going to degrade the content available. A million bumbling idiots will drum out the one that makes sense. At least they can establish some level of research distrobution via webpages and moreso, credibility if they want to stop this from happening but more to the point, so people like me don't have to wade through utter shit to find their stuff.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
So anyway, yeah, not everyone uses PHP... in fact it's a whole bunch easier to cover up URL mapping issues when you are using CGI then when you have a bunch of static documents.
/blah/blah/expired.html
.htaccess, etc. unless they are trying to implement a password check.
And if you remove a document and want to keep it that way, there's always:
Redirect gone
I think part of the problem is that lots of people use FTP to maintain sites still, with a unified view of how people will navigate their content and have little appreciation for
And some CMS systems don't handle that kind of thing well either. Anyone have any experience with Zope?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Contributions to science, law, and other scholarly fields rely for their authority on citations to earlier publications. The ease of publishing on the web has made it an explosively popular medium, and web pages are increasingly cited as authorities in other publications.
;)
:)
For true scientific work, this should never happen. Because you should only cite reviewed sources. Such as books, articles or conference papers. This is no guarantee for quality, but at least the review process sorts out the most obvious nonsense. And, if the reviewer is good, it may even increase the quality of the work. Plus, those sources are permanent.
As always, there are sources that are more respected (IEEE, ACM etc.) than others. And using respectable sources is a good thing, because normally you want to prove a point and you base your argument on those publication. So if your basis for your argument is faulty... well
Furthermore, there is hardly any information that can be found on the web but not in a reviewed form. Note that there are (accepted) scientific reviewed journals using the web for publishing. Without a printed edition. And you can quote them. And, as many before me have said, the articles and links do not vanish (the URL is usually not quoted anyway - these articles are listed just like printed articles).
This is just my personal opinion on scientific work. Let's see if my head is still on my shoulders tomorrow
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
That's sort of ridiculous, seeing since the source is sometimes bias itself (Washington Post)
To me, knowledge is only truth if both sides to an extreme are presented. Meaning; one cannot understand Abortion rights unless one here's both sides; ProLife and ProAbortion.
The sentiment that web sources, just because they aren't written without journalistic/legal lingo and because that news isn't from "the usual outlets" (CNN,ABC,NBC,CBS, Time, etc) - are not credible or don't have a point even if errant in fact or fiction, doesn't make them ANY less credible.
Research integrity is what proves or disproves a point.
I have a website up about a con artist. He uses this same argument around the web in his "defense" saying, "Anonymous sources are the only ones bashing me.." AND "It seems like anything posted here in these forums is taken as gospel"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Maintaining a links page for my wife's business' site has always been a low priority, and finally, I put up a MySQL/PHP page to do the majority of the work.
So I've been going through all the old links, and every link request we've gotten in the business' 7-year history. Of the 120 messages in the timeframe of 1997-1999, only about 15 sites still existed. Of those, two-thirds had forwarded URLs -- often from AOL or Homestead to their own brand. A couple still existed, but had totally different content.
Many just plain didn't exist at all. A fair chunk found the server, but no such page. A few had blank pages or nearly no content. The true annoyance though, is the number of domains that are owned by spamdexers/linkfarms that have no content of their own and beg you to set your homepage to them.
I've still got to cover the rest of 2000-2003 link requests, but I expect that anything pre-2001 will be very sparse.
Design for Use, not Construction!
This problem is the impetus behind ComputerHistory.net, a sort of internet archive for computer history web sites.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I'm amazed that anyone doing a professional article would even think of citing a web page as a web page.
Why not just print it out?
Not only are web pages transient, but the facts they have are subject to change. This gets back to your "pseudo-science and mis-information" comment.
If you're going to use it in your work, print a copy or save an image of it or something.
Which brings up to "fair use" and copyrights and all kinds of other crap.
An easy system would be for a server to provide each document it houses with a unique meta-data identifier. Then, when a document, story or paper moves from the "main page" into an archive section, you can still refer to the FileID. This ID should be searchable, so that an article could be linked via something like:
http://www.cnn.com/?2001EXCJA2
The IDs could be system generated and handled by a file system that supports meta-data or they could be designed to mean something and handled by a content management system.
Implementation is the difficult part. Getting everyone - or at least news sites, magazines, and colleges/universities - to set up FileID searching and then document the linking process on their site is no small task.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
This is a real problem. When Vannevar Bush conceived the Memex system, his goal was to facilitate the exchange of scientific research. Later, Doug Englebart built on Bush's ideas as did Ted Nelson (the guy who coined the term "hypertext") and Tim Berners-Lee. While the web today has become a vast sinkhole of pop-up ads, crappy web stores and inane blogs it is important to not forget that its inception was in aiding scientific research.
Yet, that is not possible without some kind of permanence. Probably what is needed is some way to integrate the web into university library collections. If there was some way of indexing web pages the way libraries currently use the Library of Congress scheme to index their physical collections, then web pages could be uniquely numbered with this number incorporated into the URL. If then universities and the Library of Congress itself were to mirror (permanently) these pages, if the original URL were to become unavailable, one could try just about any manjor university or the LOC and retrieve the page. Of course, with the current political climate here in the US I don't forsee this ever happening.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the internet is something so much greater than the article's author comprehends. The internet is not a horse and buggy that goes real-real fast, and flies over water, and has a really big wagon on the back. The internet is an explosion of the human consciousness. When it becomes static (and the RIAA and our neo-totalitarian governments are trying very hard to make it so) when it becomes static, it will be dead. Chaos is good.
I don't want to sound too much like a sooth-sayer here, but I find that its becoming increasingly hard to find *good* knowledge... and what qualifies it as *good*? Is CNN good? Is Al-Jazeer? Is my neighbor's gossip? How about what my ex-girlfriends? What about my wife? What about... heheh you get what I mean.
If we are to say that not everything is worthy of archiving, who, then, is to decide what is? The 'net shouldn't be just another memory hole when there is the potential to create a respository of information that far exceeds the scope of anything possible before. That said, people who wish to cite to information published in an electronic form should be careful to cite only to sources that are reputable not only for veracity but also for longevity.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
What's the URL for this statistic? And when that URL goes down, will that invalidate this Slashdot article?
Do you think because you print it out it suddenly becomes a more stable reference? Sometimes people doing professional articles have to cite web pages because that's where the information they are talking about is.
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
Doesn't Slashdot have an archiving system that helps pages stay alive forever ?
They just post a dupe of the story every couple weeks, thus maintaining the data forever...
j/k - it's Monday here and I haven't had my caffeine yet...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
What do you think the chances of your family photos being found in the attic by your descendants in 30 years and them being able to read them, now we're all shooting digital?
Hmmm. I'm not sure most scholary works are allowed to just cite arbitrary URLs for inline references or footnotes.
The idea is that you generally have to cite peer-reviewed, published and presented articles; criteria which the majority of web published material simply does not satisfy. Web reading would fall under the "course reading", and would have to be backed up by a "real" reference.
According to my GF (currently working on a Masters in Anthropology) there is a lot of confusion on how to use the web for scholary references. Many people cite URLs in citations that are really just online archives of previously-published work. In this case, noting the URL is like saying which library you checked the article out, and what shelf it was on. If you are an undergrad and cite a URL, it is almost a sure thing that the prof or the TA's will take marks off for improper citations.
There are a few peer-reviewed journals that are (partly or completely) published online, in which case the URL might be a valid citation. This is likely to changed, and it seems the original article was suggesting that we need to handle this case now, before we lose more good work.
In a much smaller way, this is the kind of thing that those involved in the whole blog phenomenon are trying to resolve; making sure that their blog-rolls, trackbacks and search-engine cached pages stay historically maintainable.
-- clvrmnky
"Mostly they get by because they will remove content if requested, and nobody who cares cares quite enough to sue them on behalf of "the world" when they are satisfied to have their own content removed. In other words, they are basically OK because nobody cares to sue them. Strictly speaking, archive.org probably is the world's largest copyright violation."
Maybe. Or maybe the copyright holders either don't know about the archive, or they see the value of the archive as a electronic library.
he Washington Post reports on the loss of knowledge in ephemeral web pages, which a medical researcher compares to the burning of ancient Alexandria's library.
The main difference being that most of what was in ancient Alexandria's library was considered to be of importance to at least a sizeable group of people, if not the majority, whereas most of the web pages that disappear every day are simply dross.
"It's a huge problem," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."
If you want something to last, post it on Usenet. If there a need to cite it in a document, post it with a unique ID#, so that a simple Google URL search along with the author's email address will find it among the billions of other postings.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
There's already a method of long-term storage for established knowledge, and the library at Alexandria was pretty good at it: PRINTED BOOKS. Web pages were never intended to be static monoliths of information but were from the beginning meant to represent a "living document" where the exchange of information was the important thing.
"Do you think because you print it out it suddenly becomes a more stable reference?"
Yes. Because now you have a copy of the source that you're citing.
"Sometimes people doing professional articles have to cite web pages because that's where the information they are talking about is."
And the article was about how the web pages don't stay live so you can't reference them later so the information is not available later.
So, if you're going to use web pages as a citation, you need to have a means of referencing them after they go off-line.
What better way is there than to have a copy of them yourself?
Unless it gets /.ed - then its lifespan might be measured in minutes!
This has been a real problem for a long time. But the web is distributed. The only real solution is for people to realize that moving stuff around all the time breaks links, and avoid it. One thing that would help is a translation layer in the web server, that separates the URL from the server's filesystem. This is basic software engineering common sense.
2 50" is a much better permanent URL for this story, than exposing the details of some perl script called "article.pl" that takes a parameter named "sid", and it will be easier to adapt to all future versions of Slash or other software, or to simple archive as a static file someday. Using the PATH_INFO CGI variable you can make a CGI like "article.pl" use URLS like that above.
Non-transparent CGI, PHP and ASP scripts are even worse, they tend to change all the time. Instead they should be using the "path info", or be in the server (mod_perl, etc.)
Example: "http://science.slashdot.org/article/03/11/24/127
The idea that the basic job of a webserver is to pull files off your disk is incomplete: it's job ought to be to take your URL through *any* kind of query lookup, which might map to the filesystem and might not. The HTTP RFC's imply this as well.
reed
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
This does however break UK, and I presume most oher western copyright law.
In the United States, "the fair use of a copyrighted work[...], for purposes such as [...] scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." (17 USC 107; emphasis added by yerricde).
Will I retire or break 10K?
100day information life span.. thats typial of todays 'throwaway culture'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"And heck, what's the harm in saving the pages on your drive and contacting the original author if they disppear? Hard drive space is cheap. If you take yourself seriously, you might want to grab a snap, even if it is technically illegal (not that I know that it is; Google seems to do it right often)."
You might want to make certain you have it RAID'ed. I had TWO IBM Deskstars die in the same time period. What a pain to recover what I could. And I believe that Google could fall under the same provisions as a Library.
one cannot understand Abortion rights unless one here's both sides; ProLife and ProAbortion.
Funny, you swapped the propaganda name "pro-choice" for the technically accurate ProAbortion, but you left ProLife in its typical advertising form instead of the more correct "anti-abortion". That could be bias right there.
The sentiment that web sources, just because they aren't written without journalistic/legal lingo and because that news isn't from "the usual outlets" (CNN,ABC,NBC,CBS, Time, etc)
Umm, those media you listed are web sources. If someone is going to cite CNN, ABC, NBC, or CBS, then going to the web page will be much more reliable and practical than referencing:
[3] Saw it on Nightline Aug 12, 2003, right after the 2nd commercial.
Researchers can't really cite TV. (They can cite transcripts, which are documents existing independently from the TV show, and which are often on the web)
You're missing the point. Anyone can publish on the web. The "usual outlets" (as you put it) aren't credible because they use "journalistic/legal lingo," but rather because they have an editing process and make some attempt at adhering to journalistic standards and ethics (e.g. requiring two sources to cite an opinion).
Allow me to demonstrate:
That's sort of ridiculous, seeing since the source is sometimes bias itself (Washington Post)
That's sort of ridiculous, seeing that the source is, in my opinion, sometimes biased itself (e.g. The Washington Post).
To me, knowledge is only truth if both sides to an extreme are presented. Meaning; one cannot understand Abortion rights unless one here's both sides; ProLife and ProAbortion.
I believe published "knowledge" is only truthful if the extreme sides of an issue are presented. In other words: one cannot truly understand abortion rights unless one hears both sides: pro-life and pro-choice.
A freenet-like model might be worthwhile for this kind of stuff. Data is referenced by keys that can't change, hence your link will point to the right piece of data for ever. Of course, unpopular content disappears over time, but basing this on popularity rather than the author's efforts seems like a vast improvement.
I even had the presence of mind to reprogram the personal web-space from my school account to redirect to my present one before I left. That page has been up for so long asking for "Sean Woods" gives you me as the #1 link on google. Impressive considering "Sean Woods" was a character in a Tom Clancy novel, and seems to dominate all of the rest of the links.
Back on point, running your own server doesn't cost much. Spare parts, a broadband connection with a static IP, and a little knowhow. Around Philly a place called MartNet used to have a ghetto colo where you provided the box, and they provided power and T1 access for $100/month. They don't anymore (ratzen fratzen) but if I had an old warehouse that's the business I would be in.
Hmmm. Data warehousing. Data center in a warehouse...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The article claims that "the average life span of a web page is 100 days". This is a very misleading statistic. What it really means is that the average web page is updated every 100 days, not that the page dies and goes away after 100 days.
Moreover, as you can imagine, authorative sources (the type that people are likely to quote) are updated much less frequently.
At the journal I work for, we print out copies of many online sources cited by our authors.
This works well for things like reports available online (e.g., something in PDF form) and much less well for a reference to a webpage in general (e.g., if someone writes "The Columbia Law School advertises its many course offerings in international law"--adding a link to the law school webpage as a reference--in an article about the proliferation of international law courses at major law schools). Unless one wants to print out the whole site, one is pretty much out of luck.
That aside, it's a good policy to archive print copies of web documents cited in a serious piece of research. That way, future researchers investigating the article can check the sources.
- Ben
Good point... maybe you could pull and archive the RSS feed ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
- Joe Sixpack, www.blaaa.net/index.html.
- A drunken bloke in the subway, personal communication, 2003.
are not relevant references.Should the web become the *sole* source of information, the Ministry of Truth will come into being. No piece of information will be trustworthy, because all information will be mutable.
This is already happening. Read a cnn news story (something controversial or important) and save the text. Come back a couple of hours later-- you will often find changes in the text.
What is truth when there is no proof?
It's whatever they want to tell you.
Now, it'd be funny if that page had gone 404 on us...
Law journals have tried to tried to cope with the proper weight of authority to grant web pages by trying to follow the Blue Book, a citation manual.
The general rule has been that whenever you can find something in print, cite to that, but add an internet cite when either it is available and would make it easier to find, or if it is only available online.
Things that are only available online are surprisingly common in citation. The leading court reporter services (WestLaw and Lexis Nexis) both have cases that aren't "officially" printed, but are available online.
Also, many journal articles will cite to web pages such as a company's official description or press releases.
In general, these citations are treated for their functional purpose and not their form of media -- online cases are grouped (last) with other cases, and information from most web site is considered a pamphlet or other unofficial publication.
This system seems to deal with the fact that they are ephemera pretty well. The citations really are only used to make a point that is merely illustrative or is easily accessible to legal practitioners.
here is a recent SOSP paper that discusses using a P2P system to preserve the integrity of publications.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
It's implications go way beyond web pages, which are just one of the first manifestations of our electronic culture creating records that never touch paper, or other more established and permanent mediums.
Businesses typically only have to archive material for around 7 years legally, although some industries like pharaceuticals have to preserve data considerably longer. This is fine when records are primarly paper based, with some nice computers to speed our current business along. When records are totally electronic from start to end, ("born digital"), we start to have problems, legally and culturally. Some researches are talking about a digital dark ages, where many of our records today will simply vanish from history, totally inaccessible and unpreserved.
This is about storage, migration and emulation. It's about persistent identifiers. It's about technology obsolesence leading to cultural obsolesence.
Matt Palmer Digital Preservation Department UK National Archives.
Face it, the internet is about computers. Computers change so fast there isn't much worth hanging on to.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Citing web pages is a really dumb thing to do.
....
But if that's the only reference to the data, and you must have that reference, then you'll need to save a copy of it.
That way, if the reference does vanish, you'll still have a copy that you can "fair use" as a citation.
But "fair use" depends upon our copyright laws which are subject to change.
Even making the original copy of the web page might violate the future copyright laws.
Which brings me back to
"Citing web pages is a really dumb thing to do."
I read an interesting article a few years ago about how even our hard copy (books, magazines, musical scores, etc.) won't be nearly as useful to future historians.
Why?
Current historians learn a lot about each writers creative process, and how writers evolved their ideas, from drafts and corrections. Music scholars pore over every scratched-out note, every furious scribbled comment, in Beethoven's draft scores. Writing music was laborious and hugely frustrating for Beethoven, unlike Mozart, who hardly stopped to think and made few if any corrections.
Future scholars won't know any of this stuff, looking back at our work. We use software to edit our work... so when we fix our errors they are gone forever. We change our minds and the original idea disappears in a puff of electrons. An electronic score of a Beethoven symphony only differs from a Mozart concerto in the musical style -- all of the other data is gone.
It's a sobering thought. Where else are we going to get this data? Not letters, because we write emails now, and regularly delete them (intentionally or not). Diaries? Some people still keep them on paper... but many store them on computer, or publish them in blogs (which as discussed will mostly be gone).
Sobering thought isn't it? It's not neccessarily hubris to say we ought to be saving more of this stuff; people a few hundred years from now should be able to learn from our failures, as well as our successes.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
purl.org provides "persistent URLs", basically a permanent HTTP redirect (for instance, the Dublin Core people use http://purl.org/dc/ which redirects to http://dublincore.org/ - more importantly, they use purl.org for namespace URLs which need to stay valid indefinitely, like http://purl.org/dc/terms/1.0 which redirects to the Dublin Core Terms specification in RDF).
These don't address the fact that documents get altered or deleted, for which you're still dependent on the original author maintaining the old content at the same URL.
Sometimes documents not being modified isn't necessarily what you want, anyway - for instance, sites with navigation/stylistic stuff "wrapping" the content (like my site) might want to redo that without altering the content.
Also, sometimes a URL isn't meant to always refer to one version, but is meant to refer to the latest version (like w3.org specifications, which have a long date-stamped URL for "this version", and a short URL for "latest version of this specification").
Basically, it's up to the content author to follow good practices.
On pseudorandom.co.uk I use a year in the URL for all permanent content, except a couple of "navigation" pages (the games section, the "contact me" page) which pre-date my current URL scheme - there are so many references to those elsewhere in my site, I don't want to have move the pages, fix the links and install redirectors.
For content that existed before I switched to year-based URLs, I moved the content page to a new URL based on the year of first publication, and installed redirectors from the old name (mod_rewrite is very useful for this sort of thing).
I want future generations to have access to kirk/spock gay fan stories! How could we just let that dissapear?
Really. Methinks the author of this didn't really take a look at the majority of webpages on the net. I mean we're not talking about the library of Alexandria here, we're talking about pron sites and endlessly cross-linked blogs. Fun? Yeah. Important to the preservation of culture? God I hope not.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
When I first read this, I'll admit, I was a little alarmed. Then it occurred to me -- no one is ever going to check my citations, anyway!
I am not left-handed, either!
People still use FAT file system to store their data, though there are robust alternatives. This makes me believe that everyting is throw-away - why not culture too?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
actually, how would "they" ever know it really was you who was posting, not someone with same name? Only a problem if you posted from your company's computer system, and you still work at the same place after 10+ years (how many slashdotters would fit category of having same job for more than decade?)
It's the Theory of Evolution. The strongest web pages will survive! The archeologists of the future can still dig through mountains (of data) in the future to learn about us.
The article is not about archiving "everything in the world." It's specifically about references in scholarly papers, which, for the past three or four centuries, have been part of the essential fabric of scientific research. In a research paper, everything you say is either supposed to be the result of your own direct observation, or backed by a traceable, verifiable, and critiquable authority.
You don't just say "Frotz and Rumble observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32," you say "Frotz and Rumble (1991) observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32." Then, at the end, traditionally, you would put "Frotz, Q. X and Rumble, M (1991): Dilatory freeble-tropism in the edible polka-dotted starfish, Asterias gigantiferus (L) (Echinodermata, Asteroidea), when treated with radioactive magnesium pemoline. J. f. Krankschaft und Gierschift, 221(6):340-347."
Then if someone else wondered about that statement, they'd go to the library and pull down volume 221 of the journal, and see that Frotz and Rumble had only measured that factor on six specimens, using the questionable Rumkohrf assay. If they had more questions, they'd write to Frotz at the address given in the article, asking them whether they remembered to control for the presence of foithbernder residue.
This sort of thing is absolutely essential to the scientific process and makes science self-correcting.
The article says that these days, the papers are published online, the references are URLs, and that an awful lot of them are stale. If so, this cuts to the very heart of the process of scientific scholarship.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's not just the short lifespan of a webpage... it's also the fact that the source isn't always reliable. Web publications are rarely given the same strict editorial process as most journal articles. The content might be just as good - or better - but they're also not given the same credibility.
The problem *is* the short lifespan of web pages. Even "reputable" publications move their pages around, or remove them entirely, breaking all links. I'm talking about major newspapers, scientific journals, etc. It's these people, the supposedly reputable ones, who need to do a better job. The way they're doing things now is indeed, "no way to run a culture."
Please... the burning of the Great Library set back our entire race centuries.
The fact that I can no longer read the entry in my ex's blog from the day she realized I was trying to get it on with her little sister is hardly comparable.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
This article discusses the research into the subject problem. Ironically, the paper to which they link, on the researchers own site is no longer at that address!! Seems like the authors were not eating their own dog food, as they say. Furthermore, news.com did a good job preserving the URL for the last 3 years. Kudos to them.
If you make any references to a website, be sure you maintain a local copy on your website along with the link to the original and ALWAYS reference your website.
For e.g.
reference 10. XX Available at http://www.mypage.com/reference_list/xx
page xx constains
Article by so and so. Link here. Local Cache over here.
The obvious reason for this is that it costs money to keep a presence and data available on the internet, whereas when information is archived by the old library system it incurred no overheads on the author.
The real shame is that now information is an asset (to be bartered or controlled) a well-meaning foundation cannot host the data without incurring legal penalties.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
Recently a colleague of mine published a paper in an online peer-reviewed journal which contained a trivial error (transposition typo) that however would change, in fact reverse, the interpretation results. They were permitted to fix this, months after the article had first been posted. Does this aid Progress, or is it Revisionist?
Those days are over.
Today, a book that is thrown away -- unlinked -- is effectively destroyed. When a server is turned off, that information is rendered inaccessible to the world at large. A DRM'd work is similarly useless. If only one person has the right to store and disseminate a given piece or set of information, that information is vulnerable to complete destruction, and everybody stands to lose. Still copyright protects people's "right" to hide and destroy information.
Why should information (which we cannot judge to be valuable or not until we have encountered it) be allowed to be destroyed? Can We, as a society, afford this?
We are misusing the Internet, which was designed to replicate information in a fault tolerant way. Whether or not any given information is valuable to business should not be our question. Our question should be: How can We allow laws originally conceived to increase the volume and newness of information to prevent Our access to information? Instead of making Us more educated, copyright is making Us more ignorant, and putting some people in court and stealing their hard earned cash (this is actual theft, be it legal or not, because the person is actually deprived of real money, as opposed to the "theft" of P2P which deprives copyright holders of fictitious money -- they call it "potential profit").
Ignorance has profited many regimes from the book burnings of China's First Emperor to the prohibitions on education in the Indonesia of the Dutch. However, today, it is supposed to be We The People who rule. If that is so, why do we allow a few scattered monopolists to steal from Us the information that empowers Us to be the rulers of Our elected representatives? If government censorship is wrong, why is corporate censorship right (especially when corporations have so much influence over governments)?
Access and copy restrictions should be illegal for all intellectual material, since, if it is "intellectual property" at all, it is the property of Us The People for Whom the Constitution of United States and all similar documents were written. It is every individual's responsibility to replicate as much information as possible to ensure the information is available to everyone even after the publisher's fickle breezes have changed course.
I thank the Internet Archive for its humble attempt at fulfilling this responsibility. Where are the rest of Us The People who are willing and able to defend their right to learn, nay, their right to think?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
While it's obvious that not every URL is appropriate for a research paper, papers in high energy physics have used URL-references to preprints at arxiv since 1991. It's not surprising to see some less technical fields like anthropology further behind in understanding and using the technology, and high energy physics has a particular advantage in that the web was originally created for disseminating information in that field.
People interested in the evolution of an electronic knowledge architecture that's gradually replacing the print one in some scientific fields will likely find the articles Creating a global knowledge network and Can Peer Review be better Focused? interesting. Both are by Paul Ginsparg, who started the preprint archive 12 years ago at LANL.
It's also worth noting that free, public access to preprints has democratized physics research, as all researchers have access to timely information instead of only a few who had the right connections to get early copies of preprints before 1991. It also provides affordable access to physics articles to researchers at institutions whose libraries can't afford the 5-figure subscription fees of many modern scientific journals.
Here's the solution for them:
Poof! Easy.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
If you want your scientific papers to be archived, publish them on Arxiv (search on Google). Arxiv is replicated to multiple sites, backed up, archival, and does the right things with versions and changes.
This is patently rubbish.
Example: Ann Coulter's book Treason. It's utter crap. Full of lies and innuendo. But, it's a book with an ISBN number. Why is it privileged over a webpage?
Another example: anything written by Bill O'Reilly. I know there are "liberal" examples, but the right wing nutjobs are so lacking in subtlety, that they make for simpler examples. Anyway: his book is also utter balderdash and plays fast and loose with the facts. But: it's a book, and so it gets privilege over some intelligent well reasoned webpage (regardless of political persuasion.)
He or Coulter get to go on book tours, travel the USA slogging their lies and stupdity on radio programs, all because ooks are privileged. Meanwhile, perfectly reasonable bloggers write incisive intelligent analysis and are completely ignored.
Now, when it comes to scientific papers, there is a thing about peer review in papers, and so for that reason, these publications do have privilege, but they needn't be printed on trees. Hence: there is a complexity involved: if there is peer review, the final resting place of the info is of less consequence: a peer reviewed paper on protiens that is published at a website and can be found years later on the same website, has a lot of privilege - nearly as much as the same document printed on paper and mouldering away in a library basement.
But without the conditionals, the peer review, etc., there is a vast gap in privilege, and I see that as essentially problematic for archiving the culture of our time. Perhaps it should all be printed in pH balanced paper and stored in a warehouse...
Another interesting problem is this: we're not going to have the same massive overpopulation in the future, that obtains in the present. There will be an order of magnitude fewer people looking at the stuff, and equally less interest in it. Given the volume and scale of the data set, we're looking at a catastrophic loss of information. Since it is all digital, ther won't be any recourse: it's nto like clay tablets that can be glued back together. I humbbly submit that people 1000 years fro mnow will know more about the 18th century than the late 20th or 21st centuries, and that's just very sad.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
As others pointed out, this article referers to citations made in research papers to online sources which become obsolete over time. Unless your 4 year old is regularly publishing work referenced in academic journals, this probably isn't an issue.
Incidentally, try Citeseer for an example of a stable online repository of research papers.
Since publishers register DOIs as soon as the electronic version of the article is available online, the article is citable using DOI way before the print journal goes to press. And since the DOIs are persistent, links will work even if the journal changes ownership/publisher.
In addition to providing free DOI resolution, CrossRef also provides a free metadata lookup for libraries (or it will provide it for free soon I think). Libraries will be able to lookup DOIs using article metadata as needed.
Many publishers also participate in variety of archive initiatives, where a copy of every electronic article is made available in large or national libraries for safekeeping. In case the publisher goes out of business, the library or institution has the authority to make the stored archive available to public. With persistent DOIs this will be very easy since the existing links will not break even if the servers are different.
There's another copy of the archive at "archive.bibalex.org", in Egypt. Brewster Kale wants to have four copies worldwide; then, he thinks, the information will be safe.
One problem with the Internet Archive is that the server farm is unreliable. Sections of the archive drop offline for days at a time. It's built out of thousands of commodity PCs sitting on shelves in a building in San Francisco.
Another problem is that web sites that are too complex don't get archived properly. If there are links embedded in JavaScript, Java, or Flash, they won't be properly adjusted to the appropriate archive references. This becomes more of a problem as more pages are created with overly complex authoring tools.
The URL may work today, but what happens when the site moves to a more scalable system?
Then the system uses a rewrite rule to HTTP Redirect each page in the old URL-scheme to a page in the new URL-scheme. What's so hard about that? Cool URIs don't change.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's better to fix it than to leave it broken, but even better IMO,
is to fix it and add a footnote that explains when the change was made, and why.
-- this is not a
This is a big improvement over the previous system, where you would send of printed copies of your work to bigshots and people you thought might be interested and prevented wider distribution of preprints and results until your article was accepted and published by a journal, which with refereeing and printing backlogs, averages more than a year for most research journals in mathematics.
From the arXiv front FAQ, addressing the concerns in the article:
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
From a practical perspective, I have noticed the same phenomenon over the years, and have created the following axioms for my own sanity:
1. You can not depend on any outside entity to archive information that is important to you.
If there is come critical piece of information that you need to do your job, or as a reference to related work - by all means download and keep an archival copy for your own use. While the Internet Archive is an excellent resource - there is no way they will be able to keep track of everything on the net for all time. The drawback of this is that if you do not periodically look at the original web page you will be using the latest information (I will address this issue in a moment).
2. Look for means of extending the ability to locate information beyond the URL.
While the URL is a great boon to keeping unique locations on the web, they do not encapsulate enough information (meta information) to make searching and locating information easy. The problem is not just related to the internet - it also encompases other storage mediums (i.e. files outside of the exposed WWW partition). There are some recent tools that are at a test bed level now that can be used to solve this problem if brought into mainstream use, as we will see below.
I see several technologies need to be developed/perfected to help ameliorate these issues:
a) Software needs to be developed for end users to manage their own information resources - similar to how the Internet Archive keeps track of changes to web pages. The software should allow the user to archive pages to the local drive as desired, and provide a version control system for easily retrieving previous versions as needed; the system should also provide:
b) An easy means of keeping meta information and annotations regarding a particular web document needs to be made a standard part of all web browsers. A good starting point is the W3C Annotea standard for keeping meta data - as implemented in the Amaya editor/browser.
I think a good set of the pieces are already in place to accomplish what I suggest - the real issue now is integrating them into current end user tools.
The next, and perhaps biggest, question that needs to be resolved is how does DRM fit into this picture (if at all), and how much will DRM serve to further erode the cultural continuity archivists desire?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I think every article being referred to by Slashdot should be cut and pasted here just for ease of use of historical posts. Otherwise, what is the purpose of keeping historical posts?
archive.org provides an essential service to counteract the short lifespan of the typical webpage. It also allows for permanent links to webpages that might be gone soon. I personally think that academia should either pour money into archive.org or create their own specialized archive for academic websites.
In the later case, the service would archive sites of scholarly interest on its own and it would have a feature that would allow someone writing an academic paper to request that a particular page be archives. The page that he references in his work would be a http://academicarchive.org page, not the original.
How about some sort of long, unique global identifier for each page? That way, as a page is updated, moved, etc. a search engine could follow it.
Wouldn't be too hard to slip into the meta tags, and it would allow pages to be followed from host to host, with the latest changes intact.
A very long hash of the initial contents oughta do it, though then you run the risk of people updating the hash with each version, thereby creating "new" documents.
There is only so much cruft that can be dealt with.
.sig
The ephemeral nature of the web improves it's signal to noise ratio immensely.
(Not that it's good mind you, just better than it would be otherwise.)
Research papers that quote web pages may not be very good papers,
but that doesn't mean that the right answer is a more permanent form of web page.
It would be bad to write it on tissue paper,
but that doesn't mean we should get rid of tissues.
If a paper needs to be less transient than the web page it's citing,
then the paper's author should contact the web page's author and arrange for a copy.
If anyone wanted to cite something I wrote,
I wouldn't mind if they included a copy, and not just a link.
I doubt I'm the only one who would be willing to do that.
-- this is not a
Cool URIs don't change
A bit over-idealistic, but worth aiming towards even if you don't achieve 100% non-URI-breakage in practice.
I feel that search engines should slightly penalize sites that have a history of breaking links or making them redirect to a completely irrelevant page: partly because there is just less chance that the link you follow from the search engine will have the content you want, and partly because even if you do get to a correct page, its usefulness as a bookmark or a link from your own dcuments is reduced.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Actually, a great deal of the early Usenet postings were from academic institutions, and in those days, people used their own names for the most part since it seemed reasonable and more dignified (and it didn't occur to most people to have anything else.) So a post from 1988 from "saracoombs@physics.cornell.edu" is easy to match up with a currently exisiting person who was doing graduate work at Cornell then named Sara Coombs, to make up an example. Hopefully she didn't get in flame war about cold fusion or somesuch in those days, perhaps now jeopardizing her chances for a good job or heaven forbid, elected office!
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Yes. I personally know of one very senior researcher confronted by a review board with his posts about good places for gay cruising!
Unless I remove them, I will soon get to deal with the much more fun aspect of, "Dad, what's an acid trip and where did you go when you took them?" from my daughter.
Yes, you can remove usenet posts from Google Groups.
I always thought the authors of most web pages were the weak links. Ba-dum-dum!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Agreed. Most insitutional accounts required your real name and the "rn" package put it into the usenet.
To be fair google, the biggest usenet archiver, has a procedure for hiding ancient posts. I think it is tedious, especially if you have hundreds or thousands.
while i agree that there is a lot of "crap", out there, any idiot who doesn't check/verify their sources deserves the derision which they will receive when (eventually) someone else tries to check/verify their publication[s].
what ever happened to good, old-fashioned, primary research (i.e. check the facts for yourself)?
(btw - I run into a lot of "pseudo-science... crap" in "respectable" publications (ex: 27 empirically derived coef.'s to fit a 4th order relation, &c.) -- the 'net doesn't have a corner on this stuff)
The ephemerality of web pages creates a situation that is more akin to a house fire that burns up Great-Aunt Gertrude's bundles of love letters from her sweetie in World War I.
A historian might use that bundle of letters to shed light on some historical question. But you can rest assured that same historian will exhaust every possible traditionally published resource in the process.
If the "knowledge" exists only at a website & the website disappears, thereby destroying a researcher's work, I'd offer that the researcher & not the archival medium is to blame.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I was just thinking about this the other day. As I've gone over my own website looking at old links, I've come to the realization that most of the sites on the 'net that I'd link to often are gone after a year. If I'm writing articles that cite references or locations for additional information, or just including courtesy-links for further reading, the links frequently go dead long before I ever notice.
The obvious solution is to write web content to be commpletely self-contained, just to save yourself all of the maintenance woes down the line. This, of course, is highly unfortunate, since the "hypertext" nature of the web is one of it's greatest strengths. The lack of any longevity in its content is perhaps it's greatest weakness.
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
I understand that this article is dealing with scientific papers, but this is just one of many complaints people have with the web, especially those who think of it as the whole internet.
:o)
It started out as a quick and simple stateless file server protocol, and it's good at that. The limitations have caused things like SSL, CGI, cookies to be created to fill in the gaps. Now people want to add versioning too. Sure, why not. Add some new headers in there and have a CVS like service that can backup old data and present the web page at any given point in time.
We would probably still have link rot because of people deleting their archives to save space, but it would be a step in the right direction.
The more recent database driven websites and blogs make the problem even more complicated. The server would have to detect when the output for the exact same URL changed.
Imagine the possibilities though. Add the date to a URL and 10 years from now people could see what the internet used to be like. Thankfully not back to when you could create a single page web site with a gray background and it could be a "Cool Site of the Day".
Not only is the above comment informative and insightful, but this bit is brilliantly funny. I would have run out of clever ideas at about the word "starfish."
That's because anti abortion is synonomous with pro life but the term pro choice is not synonomous with pro abortion.
Hi!
Happy Monday! I just wanted to point out the econmics of printing is vastly more expensive than publishing on the web. This means that research previously not available historically because of the printing expense will now be available. This is a good thing I think. However, there will exist the problem of peer review or authentication; both will be onerous as the sheer volume of publication will defy peer review and authentication capabilities. It is definitely worth taking this problem seriously and finding solutions in my opinion.
Arguably, the problem runs much deeper, in that our entire basis for civilisation is geared toward lookin forward, rather than back.
In our culture, we tend to look to the past only for affirmation that we are doing the right thing. So long as we're comforted on that front, our eyes remain firmly in the future. Censorship concerns aside, the Web is the perfect medium for this culture, as the content can vary to suit the times.
Peer review directs the attention of researchers to the present, and forces them to verify their assumptions by looking to the past. These must be rock-solid anchors to the past, otherwise their research is nothing but a house of cards.
This goes against the basic premise that propels commercial society forward - namely, that there is nothing to be learned from the past. The Web is ideal for commerce and pop culture, but simply the wrong medium for placing anchors in the past.
Increasingly, we look like Coyote from Road Runner cartoons - he runs off a cliff, then stops and looks down to oblivion shortly before gravity kicks in.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
I love the conspicuous absence of the terms "Symmanted Web" and RDF from this entire discussion.
Here's one idea for a solution.
Krankschaft und Gierschift is certainly worth citing from any time. Frankly, who gives a shit if someone makes a reference to something on the internet, and it goes away? I'm thinking that the first thing someone does while reading an article, when they don't recognize a name, is jump to the references right away to see where they were published, and if there's a bunch of "internet" links, they're going to continue skeptically. Meanwhile, there are still journals, and people are still publishing in them. Stuff that wouldn't be written up anywhere is all over the internet, and when it becomes actually worth releasing, it can be published in a journal somewhere, and then you can do an intercollegiate information request, and feel smug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What concerns me most is concepts like protecting copyrights/patents of protocols or formats so that any work created using these protocols is rendered inaccessible if the holder of the copyright of the file format used deems so. The part I fume over a lot is not necessarily that one has the rights to enforce protection of something like a protocol, but that businessmen seem to completely lack the foresight into knowing not to stick their heads into nooses that others control.
For as long as I have been in this business, I have insisted on creating any content I produce in open formats, so that it can be imported into any subsequent editors for viewing/manipulation. It bugs the shit out of me when some manager type wants the whole shebang in "word format", as now I know, not only will this whole thing most likely be readable one one kind of system, its now very likely to have compatibility issues over versioning of the OS, file manipulator, and any "enforced obsolence" the vendor may use his authority to require. I can still read files today that I originally coded for my IMSAI and Commodore-64. It was all ASCII. If I want to go back to that old program I coded for my Commodore-64 to see the equations for how I modeled my varactors for my phase-locked-loops, I am quite free to do so ( they had quite complicated equations to do it right... including calculus derivatives. ).
If I had locked myself into a proprietary format, I would have been in the same boat as one of my previous employers who had us for years putting drawings into a proprietary-type filebase, only later to have that old filebase drift into unsupported oblivion. I learned a lot from that.
The whole affair, in my mind, was millions of dollars worth of wasted effort - when one considers not only the salary of all those people we had at the drafting tables entering the data into the system, but on top of that, the loss of the benefit we were supposed to have by doing all this work. It sure taught me that having a file format open and supported by many vendors is critical to long-term usability of anything. I find a sue-happy company out there launching lawsuits against anyone "infringing" on their little proprietary protocols, and I will show you a company I won't touch with a ten foot pole. I haven't the foggiest idea why some businessmen think they can involve themselves with such a company and not get burned.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
All that is required is to archive webpages that are cited in academic or scholarly research. Maybe all that is required is the creation of an academic resource designed in a way to overcome copyright issues and allow an academic or scholar who cites a webpage to submit an online request for its archival at the time of submitting his paper for publication. And then for readers who want to consult a webpage that is cited in an academic or scholarly publication to head to that site where they can either search for the webpage, or the author and/or title of the paper that cited it. Call it citedpages.com, the domain is even available.
Basically, citation is the requirement for archival. A logo can be awarded to pages that are cited to reward their creators for allowing their pages to be copied and archived, which they may proudly display on their page as a portrayal of credibility of their content, and evidence of scholarly or academic citation in a publication can be used to guard against fraudulent submision.
Come to think of it, this sounds like a potential business opportunity. Revenue may come from advertising to a vertical market audience. All is well until some university or governmental body create a competing site.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
The light at the end of the tunnel for this is XML. It is basically a plain text (ascii or utf-8, take your pick) standard which means it shouldn't have compatability issues as you described.
However (and this is a big however), Microsoft is basing their next-gen file standard on XML, but of course, with proprietary extensions. My ferverent hope is that the XML standard, which is designed to be extensible, is bulletproof enough to withstand Microsoft's 'embrace and extend' IT control paradigm.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Of course, the duplication of information for the sake of human knowledge is too practical. Forces like the RIAA and MPAA would rather fight it to the detriment of all.
Billingsley: "Fotzenmoldarischkeit?" Good heavens, what a strange word! I must say, I haven't the foggiest notion. Have you looked in the google.com section, near the catalog?
Wilkins: Yes, I did, and it suggested several articles. Unfortunately, all of the shelves were gone! Ripped quite out of the floor it seems. Not a trace left.
Billingsley: Oh my, how unfortunate. Are you quite sure you looked at the right shelf?
Wilkins: [somewhat irritably] I can assure you, Old Boy, that I am quite capable of searching for a book. Here, I believe I still have the reference...
Billingsley: [squinting through his reading spectacles] Hmm, yes... I see. "h-t-t-p colon slash slash w-w-w dot blackwell dash synergy dot com slash links slash d-o-i slash ten dot eleven eleven slash fourteen sixty-seven slash ninety-two slash..." What's this? Is this "'a' eight s", "'a' eighty two," or "a-b-s"? Here, here, I do believe you may have looked on the wrong shelf. You do know they are not in linear order, don't you? Billingsley: The librarians must eliminate shelf fragmentation, Old Boy! "'a' eighty-two may well be on an entirely different floor from "a-b-s!" Wilkins: Confound it! Why don't they put things together by Topic! Why can't one simply browse through the stacks and find what one needs!The burning of the library of Alexandria is one of the master meme plagues of western civilization. IIRC, Carl Sagan waxed most eloquent about that supposed disaster. Edward Gibbon, to my mind the greatest historian and prosidist the Anglosphere has yet produced, recounts the story in Chapter LI: Conquests By The Arabs -- Part VII of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
Now go back and read that quote again. That's right. Edward Gibbon says it did not happen.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Most people first post the paper to a permanent archive (example), then publish the paper in a traditional-style paper journal (which may also put it online in a proprietary system). If the paper wasn't important enough to post to a permanent archive, and wasn't important enough to pass peer review at a journal, then it probably, er, wasn't very important, and doesn't need to be preserved.
IMHO the problem is the reverse: too much stuff gets enshrined in journals. The vast majority of articles published in journals never get referenced in any later paper. It's not that it's all wrong, it's that it's utterly insignificant. In the time I was doing physics research, I really only published two papers that I thought were fairly important (most of the rest were basically things where I made some token contribution, and got my name on it). Of those two, I checked recently, and only one seems to have been referenced by a later paper.
Find free books.
Backups will contain the drafts in the future. Some them will surely survive.
There's a weird kind of paradox involved in what will survive, though.
Digital media has that wonderful property that it can be reproduced *perfectly* -- such that the copy is indistinguishable from the original -- but it must be copied or it will die.
You can burn your vacation videos to CD so your grandkids will be able to see them -- but that CD won't be readable anymore in a decade, never mind a century. If you faithfully make sure they're recopied every once in a while, though (and possibly converted to whatever new video formats are invented), your descendants 500 years hence will be able to see you waving from behind that sandcastle in California, as if it were filmed yesterday. No more flipping through yellowed photographs or crumbling newspaper clippings.... Imagine it! A scientist may use your video to prove his point about how the sunsets on the west coast have improved since California sank into the ocean.
He has to use family videos, though, because two decades of scientifically-recorded data on weather patters was all wiped out when a massive electromagnetic bomb was set up by terrorists in 2012.
Yeah, far-fetched example. I don't want to force the point, and definitely lots of stuff will survive... but our progeny won't be making the same kinds of attic discoveries that we can today.
"Hey, viddy all these ancient discs that Old Grampy Limp Devil had cached away up here! Can you run them? Nothing, huh? Oh, well."
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted it to be called the `Uniform Document Indentifier'[1]. However the IETF thought it was `arrogant' to refer to it as `universal'; the web after all was insignificant at that time, June 1992.
`Document' was also changed to `Resource' at the same meeting and `Identifier' was changed to `Locator'. The latter, the IETF felt, emphasised the fact that resources can be moved about. Berners-Lee on the other hand, realised that `identifier' emphasised that URI's should be persistant. IMO, it is this third part of the appelation rather than `Universal' that suggests that a URI could be like an ISBN.
[1] Berners-Lee, "Weaving The Web", p66-67, Orion Business, 1999.
Of Course
"Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted it to be called the `Uniform Document Indentifier'"
should be
"Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted it to be called the `Univeral Document Indentifier'"
On the one hand, pretty good, considering that I use digital to shoot large numbers of images and then choose the best ones to print. On the other, pretty lousy, as I don't intend on being dead in 30 years, and I don't keep my photo albums in the attic.
And your response is synonymous with bullshit.
If I hadn't posted, if I still had karma points, and if there were a mod for ``pedantic'', you'd've gotten my vote ;)
Sorry, for the error and thanks for the (corrected) correction---it's been a long while since I read the book (need to remember to add a link to it from my web site).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
the pages didn't die... the faculty members did. The content reverts to being property of the estate and is removed from the web entirely. There is no new server location... the content simply ceases to be on the web.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
I agree with this comment except for the implication that a "formal hierarchy" would be preferable. Seems obvious, but a little more thought reveals the flaws. Who chooses the hierarchy? You may file something in one place while I might look for it in another. That's why a web is better than a tree. How many times have you lost something in your "hierarchical file system" and had to track it down with grep or find or "Search"? And how many times have you (wished you could spare the time to have) reorganised your stuff and put it in a new hierarchy as your interests and project evolve. I believe that newer "file systems" are abandoning the hierarchical/tree structure altogether in favour of a "search" paradigm. Alta-Vista used to sell something like this.