Probably hard to from their hospital bed, but I don’t see what this feast fit for a squire has to do with that.

This sounds like a fake website that Kitboga would make up for scambaiting.

That’s not true.

Okay, then you’ll need to explain the annual emails I’ve gotten saying “Your application to the Wikipedia Library has been approved” after I apparently tripped and fell and filled out a manual form applying to the library every year.

It doesn’t seem selective once you meet the four aforementioned criteria, but you do need to manually apply.

The idea you’re talking about, meanwhile, is nonsensical and doesn’t address basically anything about the massive structural problems blacklisting archive.today imposes. I wholly support expanding out the Wikipedia Library, but even this pie-in-the-sky version of it falls too far short of what archive.today provides – and that’s just going forward in an ideal world where you can snap your fingers and make this fantasyland WPL happen as soon as archive.today is blacklisted.

The “backcatalogue”, so to speak, is what’s going to be the most catastrophic part of this by far. I spent years where my main focus was just on bringing dead sources back to life; I don’t know the full extent of how bad this is, but I know for damn sure what you’ve suggested (which won’t ever happen) undoes barely a fraction of the damage.

I think you have a very severe misunderstanding of the Wikipedia Library, which I have access to and frequently use. The WPL allows active editors in good standing to access paywalled sources.

• You must have an account which is 6+ months old, has made 500 edits, has 10+ edits in the last month, and is not blocked. (an extreme minority of editors, let alone readers.)
• You must first apply to gain access.
• For publications with limited subscriptions, you must individually apply on top of your WPL access.
• Critically: the WPL does not host any of these publications. You are taken to them via a portal and given an access token.

I can’t emphasize enough how absurd this comparison is. “Solar farms exist; building a Dyson sphere would be basically the same thing. Let’s get to work.” And the thing is: I wish you were right.

Edit: That said, if you ever need copyleft material, we do maintain Wikimedia Commons for media generally and Wikisource which is a transcribed digital library of free sources. Much narrower in scope than this, but I highly recommend them!

some mf really threw an entire hog carcass into a blender and said “yea let’s sell that as food. Great.”

“Dead animal in my dead animal? Revolting.”

So my suggestion, brainstorm ideas that would make you independent:

Editors have been doing this for years.

Make agreements with IA to improve retention,

The IA already lives on a razor’s edge in terms of copyright and is doing everything it thinks it can to push that. Many websites leave the IA be because having free, independent archives can benefit them, but it doesn’t take a lot for a copyright holder to say: “Hey, you’re hosting my IP verbatim, I sent you a takedown request, you didn’t comply, and I’m taking you to court.”

You can’t just “make agreements” for the IA to violate copyright law (more than it arguably already is). They’re already doing the best they can, and pushing them to do more would endanger Wikipedia even worse. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the IA dying would be a project-wide apocalypse.

roll your own archiver,

I’d bet it could be done if the IA went down, triggering a project-wide crisis, but among other things, I’m sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t want to paint a target on its backs. We’re very cautious when it comes to copyrighted material hosted on Wikimedia projects, and this would be dropping a fork into a blender for us.

make a deal with news orgs to show their articles as citations (this last one I actually like most the more I think about it. A good negotiator can call it advertising for the news org and you’ll at the same time not infringe on copyright like archive[.]today is).

I don’t think I understand one. The Wikimedia project gets to host verbatim third-party news articles? This is creative but completely unrealistic; you’d be asking news organizations to place their work under a copyleft license for citing on Wikipedia (that’s what we host except for minimal, explicitly labeled fair use material that has robust justification). It’d be a technical nightmare any way you slice it, and logistically it’d be a clusterfuck.

Even if you magically overcame those problems, Wikipedia exists to be neutral and independent, and this “wink wink nudge nudge ;)” quasi-advertising deal would look corrupt as fuck – us showing preferential treatment for certain sources not based on their quality but on their willingness to do us favors.

If you wait until point of no return, the choice has already been made for you whether you like it or not. And worst part is that you’d scramble to find a solution instead of the best solution.

Here’s the thing: we know. This RfC is full of highly experienced editors deciding if Wikipedia is going to amputate. Option A means immediate, catastrophic, irreversible, mostly unfixable damage to Wikipedia. That is something that needs to be thought through, and your suggestions – which are appreciated for showing you’re giving it real thought – reflect that people who don’t regularly edit can’t really, viscerally understand how completely screwed Wikipedia is by this.

I don’t really see it as a complicated issue.

That makes sense from (what I think is) an “outsider’s” perspective. From an “insider’s” perspective*, here’s the problem:

• Wikipedia has a strict verifiability policy.
  • This policy states that “Each fact or claim in an article must [correspond to reliable sources]”.
  • This policy is the bedrock of Wikipedia. The project is fundamentally unsustainable without it, and we’re still undoing damage from decades ago when the policy either didn’t exist or was too loosely enforced.
  • I’m making a third bullet point because I cannot emphasize enough how much “just ignore it lol” cannot work and has never worked.
• Hundreds of thousands of articles have citations sourced to archive.today.
  • This is despite the fact that the Internet Archive is prioritized whenever possible. We even have a prolific Internet Archive bot that (when possible) automatically recovers citations.
  • The Interrnet Archive complies with blanket takedown requests of a domain very easily. Even if we ignore the ones going forward because now both resources are unreliable, archive.today would have untold millions of webpages archived which the IA does not – many of which are used on Wikipedia.
  • Archive.today will archive material that the Internet Archive will simply fail to archive because, on a technical level, it’s just better at capturing a static snap of an article (which is what we want). It’s especially true for paywalled articles, which the Wayback Machine is often stymied by.
• This would also make the Internet Archive the only remaining avenue for archiving URLs, meaning Wikipedia effectively collapses if something happens to the IA (granted that’d already be catastrophic with archive.today, much moreso than archive.today’s hypothetical removal).
• Archiving URLs isn’t just some incidental thing.
  • Citations are the backbone of Wikipedia. Casual readers might find them comforting to have. Researchers will rely on them. But editors cannot operate without them. We might actually use them more than readers do, because they help us a) check what’s already there, b) better understand the subject ourselves, and c) expand out the article.
  • Link rot is so much more pervasive than I think people fully grasp. When I’m writing an article, if possible, I archive every single source I use at both the Wayback Machine and archive.today, because relying on the link staying up is objectively a mistake (and relying on just one is negligent).
  • The security that archives offer generally just incalculably reduces the workload and mental load for editors.

If you’ve ever tried to add a citation on Wikipedia to a sentence that says “citation needed”, you’ve rubbed up against Brandolini’s law. A corollary is that it’s much, much harder to cite an uncited statement than it is to create one. If you remove archive.today, you flood Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of these. It’s dampened a bit by the fact that the citation metadata is still there and that some URLs will still be live, but I cannot emphasize – as an editor of nearly 10 years, with over 25,000 contributions, and who’s authored two featured articles – that you’d introduce a workload that could never be done, whose repurcussions would be felt for decades at a time when Wikipedia is already on shaky footing.

Even if you somehow poofed away all that work, there are bound to be tens of thousands of statements in articles you have to get rid of because they simply cannot be reasonably sourced anywhere else. For many, many statements, this is not incidental information independent from the rest of the article; many of these removals would require you to fundamentally restructure the surrounding prose or even the entire article.

It’s hard for me to explain that you just have to “trust me bro” that those people voting “Option C” take what archive.today did very seriously and recognize that either option is going to mean major, irreparable damage to the project. Wikipedia is a lot different from the editing side than it is on the reading one; sometimes it’s liberating, sometimes it’s horrifying, and in this case it’s “I could use a hug”.

* “Outsider” and “insider” used to denote experience editing; most anyone can do anything on Wikipedia from the get-go.

As a longtime editor who makes heavy use of archive.today (it’s often much more effective than the Wayback Machine), I’m deeply conflicted about this, and this is disgusting behavior on the part of archive.today; regardless of what a piece of shit the blog owner is, I hope they see prison time for abusing their trust to perpetrate this DDoS.

Right now, the Wikipedia RfC seems pretty split. This is a complicated issue, so I’m going to need to read and think more before I chime in. Just wild.

Good thing it’s pretty easy to break windows.

I didn’t know what a meth den smells like until I saw this picture of Kid Rock.

Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.

And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.

Edit: I guess people who have no experience with FOSS user support are upset at reality. Next time, give me a list of things you want me to say, and I can bring that along with some choccy milk and some ointment for your sore ass.

We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.

Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.

I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.

I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.

“Too bad [some shit I just made up with no empirical evidence].”

sitting in a wall-e chair chugging Alfredo sauce

This is an unfair and libelous depiction of my utopia where I sit in a Wall-E chair chugging Alfredo sauce with, I’ll thank you to remember, fettuccine noodles mixed in.

I want a world where I can use those things without doing irreparable damage to my body and mind. I can fantasize about them when divorced from the practicalities.

I do want the Wall-E chairs, but I would never actually accept them. It’s like how I want a 20-liter bucket of fettuccine Alfredo, but I would never accept and eat one.

My pool is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

Once Egypt’s wives stole chancla techniques from Latin America and repurposed them for use with thick, leather sandals, they became unstoppable.

laugh track