User talk:Ark25/Archivism

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Examples of important works lost because they were not archived or the archives were mishandled[edit]

Examples of storing information for later use in Wikipedia articles[edit]

Lists[edit]

Archivists like lists. They tend to create and to manage lists about any subject. For example, archivists create lists of books and documentary movies about Thomas Jefferson or Dolphin

Opinions[edit]

References should be generated in one click[edit]

Wikipedia editors are quite a "rare commodity", you can't find Wikipedia editors everywhere these days. Wikipedia editors should have the right tools to do their work as easy and efficient as possible. I think that Wikipedia editors should not waste hundreds of hours in formatting references. Formatting references must be implemented with interface tool in order to generate references automatically, in one click. A Wikipedia editor that contributes for long periods of time will waste hundreds or even thousands of hours just for formatting references, using <ref> and en:Template:Cite web. All that time should be used for doing something much more valuable than such a painstakingly routine. I (almost) always add only referenced information into articles. Being a good wikipedian doesn't mean you have to do Sisyphean works. Many times I found that I don't have the time to add properly formatted references for the data that I add into Wikipedia articles. Sometimes I provided simple external links as a references (like this: [1]), instead of providing references with <ref>, because I had no time to format the reference. In this list I provided many references like that: Listă de clădiri importante din București (Romanian Wikipadia). Sure, I can come back later to add the information and the proper reference, but many times I won't have the time to do that later, because there is so much useful information to add to Wikipedia every day. And my memory doesn't have unlimited capacity. After a few days, I even forget that I missed adding some valuable information into a Wikipedia article. Maybe someone else will add the information and the reference later, but maybe not. Sometimes it can take years or even decades until someone else will find the same information and will add it into Wikipedia article with proper references. But sometimes the information is only available online for a few years and then it's deleted, and after that it's lost forever, no one can add that information anymore into the Wikipedia article. Such things are not exceptional, but they happen frequently.

The references should be generated in one click. Wikipedians should use their time to add valuable data into the articles, not to do grind repetitive tasks. The machines (robots) should do repetitive tasks whenever it's possible, not humans. Humans should do more valuable and creative things whenever possible. —  Ark25  (talk) 15:14, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

One solution to generate references in one click is to use a script like RefScript. However, the script needs to "learn" (add code to the script for) every newspaper. The script has to detect parameters like Title, Publication Date, Author(s) name(s) and to supply them to {{Cite web}} template. If there would be a web standard (made by W3C) for providing those parameters into certain tags, then the newspapers would be encouraged to use such a standard, since it's very easy to implement it. Not all of them would use, but some of them would certainly do. The standard would require to include in the web page of an online article something like this:

<span class="W3C_publication_date">2014-05-12</span>
<span class="W3C_author_name">John Doe</span>

And then the script will work with any site that implements the standard, without having to be constantly updated.Such a standard won't only help Wikipedia, but any Web publishing platform, like for example FaceBook, where, when you add a newspaper article in your timeline, it can present it better, with all the details: author name, publication date, etc. At this moment, when you post a link in your FaceBook timeline, it looks rudimentary.

If anyone is interested in implementing such a standard, please contact me. When we'll get enough supporters for the idea, we can ask for it's implementation. —  Ark25  (talk) 15:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I just found an external link that looks like this:

thanks to RefScript, I could transform it into this, with a single click:

I found the link in the following article: ro:Dmitri Rogozin

There are numerous times when editors add references without formatting them, simply because they don't have time. Not everyone has 8 hours available per day for participating to Wikipedia. Instead of asking them to spend more of their free time with formatting references, we should give the right tools, so they can add references efficiently. —  Ark25  (talk) 19:37, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia needs a good news archiving system[edit]

Weather in-house or outsourced, Wikipedia needs a very good archiving system. For the moment, the best archiving service I know is Archive.is . It has the following features that other services don't have:

  • It automatically archives all the links that are added into Wikipedia and it's talk pages. Wikipedia editors don't have to waste hundreds and thousands of hours for manually archiving their references.
  • It can have multiple snapshots for the same link, taken at different moments in time.
See also

 Ark25  (talk) 19:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Examples of newspapers that scanned their old issues[edit]

 Ark25  (talk) 03:38, 2 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]