DISQUS

Thomas Crampton: Wikipedia Grappling with Deletion of IHT.com

  • Daniel Tunkelang · 7 months ago
    Perhaps this is a great reminder as to why many publications frown on online sources as citations. Not only can links be removed, but the content can be modified at any time. Of course, an online publication could make a commitment to permanent links and immutable content--and could even contract with a third party to maintain an archive, in the even that the online publisher goes under.
  • Bohol · 7 months ago
    Universities have started discouraging research students to cite references from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is so inconsistent.
  • AAfter Search · 7 months ago
    This is a discussion about the NY times messing up IHT links wiping out history, not about Wikipedia.

    By the way, Wikipedia is not perfect, but that is the best we have.
  • Chris Sherlock · 7 months ago
    Yeah, that's right. It's Wikipedia that's unreliable, not the mainstream press. Because it was obviously that dastardly Wikipedia that convinced the NYT to wipe out the IHT archive. Good sir, I bow to your superior logic.
  • The_Swine_Flu · 7 months ago
    This is such bullshit. I don't want to be deleted by those haters at the New York Times.
  • @JoeHobot · 7 months ago
    Ah, wikipedia is all f***ed up to be honest, I created page for our site http://www.livecrunch.com few minutes later it was deleted with the reason of self promoting? Spam ? I followed the guide lines and everything. How some websites that are similar to ours kept theirs and ours isn't good enough for them? Thing is that if we probably would hit 5mil page views instead of 1mil they would say oh ok will let you post that LC page. I sometimes don't understand wikipedia admins.

    Anyway,

    Your story is more harsh to be honest and it's just ridiculous for them to just delete iht links.

    What do ppl in discussion say?
  • Some guy · 7 months ago
    Wikipedia did not delete the links the NYT did
  • Danny Sullivan · 7 months ago
    Yeah, I've grappled with this longer than Wikipedia. I've got stories I've cited in newspapers and magazines that stretch back over 13 years. Then they go poof as a publication dies or changes things all around. Similar to the advice above, I've found it's essential to cite the headline, date and publication name along with the URL. Then you have a shot at tracking down a copy elsewhere.
  • Glenn Fleishman · 7 months ago
    I can't believe I've been writing articles since 1995 about link breakage. I would have thought media sites would have actually seen inbound links as an intangible, valuable asset of the company. It's fiduciary misconduct in a public company to take an IT action that results in massive loss of inbound traffic, reputation, and ongoing authority.

    Back in 1995, I wrote a piece for Adobe Magazine's online site which was a very thinly veiled attack on Adobe itself having broken basically every link on the site by re-engineering with no forward path. In every site migration and redesign I've worked on nearly all links (all regular links and as many special ones as I can) work indefinitely.
  • Facebook User · 7 months ago
    IHT.Com appears on 7,291 pages, according to Domain Tools.
  • Wikipedia admin · 7 months ago
    This has happened before, although admittedly not on such a large scale. There'll be a workaround somewhere though.
  • kepero · 7 months ago
    Wikipedia has that information, but you would have to ask someone with authority for the links. Their CMS keeps track of all external links added to articles, but as far as I know there's no public interface for this data.
  • Chris Sherlock · 7 months ago
    No need to do that. It's all publicly available. Just go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LinkSearch and type in iht.com.
  • STHayden · 7 months ago
    they should just point those links at archive.org
  • speludner · 7 months ago
    "How can we count the links to the IHT in Wikipedia?"

    Would a Google of "site:wikipedia.org link:iht.com" do the trick? For me it brings up about 4500 links.
  • Chris Sherlock · 7 months ago
    It's actually very easy to find all the links in Wikipedia that point to iht.com:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speci...