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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

knowledge & history erodes

There surely is history worth preserving. It's just this "compulsive hoarding"-approach that seems ultimately futile to me.

The internet itself inherently preserves the knowledge that at least one person cares enough about to put it on a webserver. Pretty much everything of even minor relevance should be referenced by Wikipedia by now.

IMHO the internet itself is the "Internet Archive".

Remember the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami?

To be honest, no. But Wikipedia seems to have that event pretty well covered; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_an...

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> * To be honest, no. But Wikipedia seems to have that event pretty well covered*

And in a lot of cases, the actual citations or references used by Wikipedia are dead links, or have some sort of 'last retrieved at' annotation, or end up at parked/squatted domains and the original content is no longer there to validate the claims it supposedly made.

Offhand I don't know if Wikipedia has a policy on references to Internet Archive / wayback-machine links to things, but imo, being able to point to a snapshot of a reference at the time it was made, as well as the current version if it still exists, is a desirable feature, and well worth striving for.

Internet pagerot/linkrot has caused me grief with bookmarks for things I didn't realise I needed again until years later when they were gone.

> Offhand I don't know if Wikipedia has a policy on references to Internet Archive / wayback-machine links to things

They do have a policy.[1] Additionally, IA has been specifically crawling links on Wikipedia to preserve the citations.[2][3]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_the_Wayback_Machine

2: https://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/

3: https://archive.org/details/NO404-WKP/v2

There is some balance between "compulsive hoarding" and preservation. I actually agree that it's an ultimately futile effort--and not very fruitful--to obsess over preserving every bit of text, audio, and video that's ever been posted to the Internet. On the other hand, preserving the content of Usenet or even Geocities do strike me as worth some disk space and won't happen organically for the most part. And the sort of people who have the mindset to do that preservation probably inherently have a bit of the compulsive hoarder about them. On balance, I think it's a good thing.

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