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Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

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Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#31

Post by phogster »

kriro wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has recommended, and many (most? all?) of the federal circuits now have an official policy of, saving web page links to PDF and filing them along with opinions. The Supreme Court tends to do its own thing, but I think that's a simple effective solution.

This is our policy for student papers of all sorts as well. All cited weblinks must be submitted in PDF form as well. Pretty sure that's super standard practice.

I don't understand. Are you citing the links, or the pages they reference? What about videos?

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#32

Post by pinko »

3JPLW wrote: post #6

Here's a good link for context - a NYT article from September 23, "In Supreme Court Opinions, Web Links to Nowhere:" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-cou... From the first two paragraphs: "Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study[1], 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work. This can sometimes be amusing. A link i…

I love the new, "And if you quoted this in the NY Times, will you do a correction for the now changed text?" line. That wasn't there when the NYT story broke, obviously. Very clever.

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#33

Post by InclinedPlane »

martindale wrote: post #17
coldpie wrote: post #14

So, what's the solution, here? It seems reasonable for a court opinion to include a copy of the source, if possible. What about for something like a YouTube video, which could disappear at any time, but can't be represented on paper? How would you agree on a digital format for representing a supreme court opinion?

Build awareness of the importance of the permanence of URIs and what they mean to Hypertext. The only full solution is a cultural one, not a technological one.

Sure, sure. That's comparable to how to fix communism. All we need to do is change the way human beings work, change fundamental economic incentives, and everything will be golden.

It's just not possible. There's only one way to fix these problems, and it's not something most people are ready to accept. It's to turn the internet inside out, from a client-server model to a store-and-forward model. It's to treat web content more like ebooks than like fliers posted to a cork board.

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#34

Post by ynniv »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #30

I publish a print magazine. Up to this point, we've avoided printing URLs in the magazine, because our printed issues may last longer than the links will stay live. To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessa…

Except that your shortener service won't last as long as your print issues either. With the original URL there's still the hope that the Wayback Machine is still maintained and had visited the page. It's a hard problem.

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#35

Post by InclinedPlane »

jaggederest wrote: post #29
jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture isn't going to encourage people to host websites they're no longer interested in, where by "host websites" read "pay money for". The only solution is some form of legalized archiving. We need the right to copy for archiving without profit, or something. Not sketching out a full, legal solution here, just pointing out that it has to include some form of right-to-archive.

That exists. Fair use covers non-profit educational uses, such as the awesome Internet Archive: http://archive.org/

Archive.org, as cool as it is, does not archive the entirety of the internet. Moreover, it's a bit silly to posit that one website that we can surely rely on to exist always! is the solution to the fact that you can never rely on the existence of any particular website in the future.

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#36

Post by alanh »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #30

I publish a print magazine. Up to this point, we've avoided printing URLs in the magazine, because our printed issues may last longer than the links will stay live. To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessa…

I remember PC World started doing this back in like 2003. Makes sense, I think. But how are you solving the problem any better than a reader can armed with (1) the date on your cover, (2) the original URL, and (3) the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? Are you aggressively caching every page, even if you don’t make the cache public for a number of years?

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#38

Post by ScrumMistress »

alanh wrote: post #36
jaysonelliot wrote: post #30

I publish a print magazine. Up to this point, we've avoided printing URLs in the magazine, because our printed issues may last longer than the links will stay live. To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessa…

I remember PC World started doing this back in like 2003. Makes sense, I think. But how are you solving the problem any better than a reader can armed with (1) the date on your cover, (2) the original URL, and (3) the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? Are you aggressively caching every page, even if you don’t make the cache public for a number of years?

Many links usually 301 redirect for a while before dying. Maybe it helps in those cases to update the shortened URL to point to the new link.

Re: Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?

#40

Post by nonchalance »

phogster wrote: post #31
kriro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is our policy for student papers of all sorts as well. All cited weblinks must be submitted in PDF form as well. Pretty sure that's super standard practice.

I don't understand. Are you citing the links, or the pages they reference? What about videos?

You are citing a source. MLA and other schemes require you to give an access date, and the only way to definitively prove you saw content on a given date is to provide the content you saw. Web servers don't magically give users a way to go back in time.

Whether PDF is an appropriate format is a different story.

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