Wikipedia talk:Using the Wayback Machine

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1 Proof Of Concept
2 "Improperly formatted links"?
3 Templates
4 Colons are no problem
5 I wonder
6 automatic caption
7 Other archiving systems
8 Output of Template:Wayback

[edit] Proof Of Concept

Check this sandbox history page to see. --TIB (talk) 20:16, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "Improperly formatted links"?

The "improperly formatted links" given in the article seem to work just fine! Brian j d | Why restrict HTML? | 09:52, 2005 Mar 20 (UTC)

They work fine in my system too. My browser is Opera 8.01 running on WinXP system. This wouldn't be browser dependant? --The Merciful 15:13, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

They used to break, the wiki software has been fixed to cause them to work properly. The link would break at a semicolon and the rest of the text was cut off, so links broke. I suppose this article should be deleted, now that the software works. --TIB (talk) 00:03, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

I take that back, for some reason the first one works (one version) but the all versions one doesn't, because of the asterisk. Why did you confuse me? --TIB (talk) 00:06, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

I agree with the previous comment. In my browser too the so-called "incorrect" code works fine! - anon.

[edit] Templates

The "broken" links work fine for me, but to make things hopefully easier I have made a few quick templates, {{wayback}} (which links to a site's archive), and {{waybackdate}}, which links to specific instances of a site. I hope they are helpful to someone! --Fastfission 22:46, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Colons are no problem

As you can see, this link: [1] which doesn't use any silly replacement technique for its colon (:), works just fine. Maybe this was fixed with a later release of Mediawiki? --Michiel Sikma 14:20, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[http://web.archive.org/web/19980112230112/http://www.planet.nl/]

[edit] I wonder

I wonder if anyone is reading this talk page, but should Wikipedia even allow Wayback people to archive our site? I realize Wikipedia is licensed in GFDL, etc. but there are many copyright violated pages that subsequently become archived in their site, and that's not something that we want to encourage. As for most search engines, they re-cache after a while (Supplemental Index of Google being the exception), but the Wayback Machine keeps a pernament copy. -- WB 07:59, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

You said it yourself: Wikipedia is licensed under GFDL, so anybody can archive it. Period.--Eysen 02:21, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] automatic caption

i used the first template in Josiah Royce#References and encountered two bugs. first, it links to a specific version, not to the list. second,it creates an automatic anchor text which is both noninformative and not related to the page title. i could easily add text, but couldn't think of a way to delete the automatic part ("josiah royce", specifically). how and why does it happen? trespassers william 21:35, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other archiving systems

I wonder why Wikipedia is dwelling on using the Wayback machine to recover broken links, without even mentioning other archiving systems such as WebCite. As Archive.org is far from complete, there should be crosslinks to other articles describing how other services like WebCite can be used. Note that WebCite - in contrast to Wayback machine, which uses a shotgun-approach using a crawler - allows editor/author-initiated prospective archiving (taking a snapshot before the website disappears), which - if this would be done consistently by authors, a part of the Wikipedia "citing sources" policy, or handled by bots - would avoid the problem of link rot on wikipedia in the first place. Countless hours of editors are wasted just to eliminate broken links and trying to recover cited source. --Eysen 02:21, 11 January 2007 (UTC)