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Comment by Alpha3031 | Hacker News Reader

Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine. Wikipedia is not the only website that changes over time, and most don't have a easily accessible revision history.

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> Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine.

It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.

> or at least creating

I agree on creating.

The wayback machine doesn't archive every version of every page. If it's important/authoritative enough to be cited in an academic work, it's important enough to be archived with it. Universities should be investing in that kind of infrastructure, and it's shameful that they're not already experts.

> Universities should be investing in that kind of infrastructure, and it's shameful that they're not already experts.

Do you also expect universities to have an archived version of every article and book their professors cite?

This is not a honest comparison. Books are mass produced and don’t rely solely on their authors paying hosting bills and willingness to not change stuff to keep existing.

Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.

A lot of national libraries also undertake web archiving within their scope (e.g. under their national TLD) and I've sometimes found that they have items not covered by Wayback, but it's not as easy to request additions to it. The risk of having a single point of failure is certainly real, and it would certainly be nice for a coalition of libraries to maybe fund a second alternative and mandate the use of both, or something like that.

Yes. 100% yes. Obviously and clearly, yes. Universities have huge libraries and archives. It used to be a point of pride how big their libraries and archives were. University libraries bound and collated their periodicals. They converted them to microfiche to save space, but the integrity was paramount.

Yes. Libraries should be able to back-reference every citation that is included in every paper that they publish, and so should the journals. That is paramount to the scientific method. Anything that you have not verified yourself should have a clear citation that you're able to prove.

The authors usually has a copy of a cited article in their reference systems. at least as pdf. So yes i dont see why they shouldn't also keep a pdf copy of cited websites with metadata attached

this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.

Or at least have the decency to make sure there's an archive of it when you looked at it - so many times I've found sources sited and Wayback as one from two years before the cite, and one year after; completely missing what the cite was about.

For static content, the best option is probably to download the webpage as a PDF and add it to the appendix of your report.

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