Web archiving

Web-archiving is the attempt of and process used in order to collect and preserve digital content that is already available on the internet and/or the 'world wide web' (WWW).

Unlike paper documents, or digital media on physical carriers like CD or DVD, information that is presented on websites (including wiki-websites) is not only easily accessible via the internet; they are also easy to change, and prone to erosion of many kinds: from hacker attacks, to any possible reason why a server may be damaged, or a project may fail. In order to counteract those chances for loss of information once available, there have been numerous attempts to build archives to preserve content in digital form, and to make said archived content available via the internet and other channels.

Archiving wiki-websites

Becuz WikiIndex is not only meant to act as a kind of 'yellow pages' for all available wiki-websites on the internet, but also for collecting information about the 'wikisphere' in general and its history, we do keep article-pages about wikis that succumbed to failure, and if possible, document how their rise and fall has happenned. This kind of wiki-history will hopefully help wiki-people to build better wikis in more stable projects in the immediate future.

Regarding any wiki-websites that we do already have an article-page about, we do not delete said wiki-article of a failed wiki. We keep their article here on WikiIndex after they became unavailable. However, we do not simply (and only) move them into category:Dead. If possible, we add to our wiki-article URLs and/or interwiki links to an archiving project for that dead wiki-website; where at least meaningful parts of that wiki have been preserved. We at WikiIndex then go on to re-categorize that wiki-article from category:Active (or similar) to, hopefully, category:Archived. Naturally, this requires that someone had previously done something to add actual information about that wiki-website to any of those archiving services while the wiki-website was still alive and publicly available on the internet; and crucially, some or all of the actual content of the wiki-website is archived (rather than just its wiki main page and similar 'headline' pages). Accordingly, it is therefore a good practice to make sure that at least one archive project is 'informed' about that wiki-website, ideally, whenever you create a new article-page here on WikiIndex about another wiki-website.

List of web and/or wiki archiving services

• Archive.org — also known as the Internet Archive WaybackMachine; the service we use most
• archive.is — also known as archive.today, formerly known as Webpage Archive; a similar website, with slightly differing and lesser (though equally valuable) features than Archive.org
• Archive Team — helps creating and storing full backups of wikis

See also

• WikiIndex: How do you categorize a wiki that is no longer

External links

• Web archiving initiatives — category of articles at the English Wikipedia
• WebCite — science-oriented archiving service, at the English Wikipedia