#LinkRot #DigitalPreservation #DigitalArchiving: "A quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 now… don't.
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#LinkRot #DigitalPreservation #DigitalArchiving: "A quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 now… don't. That's according to a recent study by Pew Research Center, a think tank based in Washington, DC, which raised the alarm of our disappearing digital history. Researchers found the problem is more acute the older a web page is: 38% of web pages that Pew tried to access that existed in 2013 no longer function. But it's also an issue for more recent publications. Some 8% of web pages published at some point 2023 were gone by October that same year.
This isn't just a concern for history buffs and internet obsessives. According to the study, one in five government websites contains at least one broken link. Pew found more than half of Wikipedia articles have a broken link in their references section, meaning the evidence backing up the online encyclopaedia's information is slowly disintegrating.
But thanks to the work of the Internet Archive, not all those dead links are totally inaccessible. For decades, the Archive's Wayback Machine project has sent armies of robots to crawl through the cascading labyrinths of the internet. These systems download functional copies of websites as they change over time – often capturing the same pages multiple times in a single day – and make them available to public free of charge.
"When we then went and looked at how many of those URLs were available in the Wayback Machine, we found that two-thirds of those were available in a way," he says. In that sense, the Internet Archive is doing what it set out to do – it's saving records of online society for posterity."
We're losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?
Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.
(www.bbc.com)