• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    To a degree. But you also run into the classic XKCD problem of Citogenesis. This isn’t a hypothetical, either.

    Had you, for instance, mentioned something you read about your own historical house on Wikipedia in the city’s newspaper, it would now be a cited piece of information that Wikipedia links onto.

    There’s also the problem of link rot. When your small town newspaper gets bought up by ClearChannel or Sinclair media and the back archives locked down or purged, the link to the original information can’t be referenced anymore.

    That’s before you get into the back-end politics of Wikipedia - a heavy bias towards western media sources, European language publications, and state officials who are de facto “quotable” in a way outsider sources and investigators are not. Architectural Digest is a valid source in a way BanMe’s Architecture Review Blog is not. That has nothing to do with the veracity of the source and everything to do with the history and distribution of the publication.

    • MrEff@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      I have a wiki editor account primarily for updating links on pages. I have also done a handful of minor edits on some obscure pages in my field, but primarily use it to update links and references. Link rot is the worst and I wish more people would help out with it.

      • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip
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        4 hours ago

        When a link is dead, does Wikipedia allow you to change it to an archived copy of the webpage from before it was taken down?

        • cucumberbob@programming.dev
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          34 minutes ago

          Even if the link isn’t dead, most citation templates that accept a |url= parameter also accept |archive-url=, |archive-date=, and |url-status=

          Also, newly added links are automatically archived on the Wayback Machine iirc.

        • MrEff@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Not sure. I have typically just done a Google search and refound the link under the same domain but with a different sub routing.