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Online Content Is Disappearing (www.pewresearch.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Yes. And wikis, too.
We (people in general) have a tendency to share stuff in forums, like Lemmy. That's fine in the short term, but in the long term this stuff should be sorted, organised, and preferably mirrored. Wikis are perfect for that, while the internet archive is more like "bulk" storage.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This is why Discord is poison to our shared pool of knowledge, it's such a black hole for many games and software (especially ironically enough open source projects) in lieu of decent docs.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Thanks for giving me another bone to pick against Discord ¬¬
Seriously. Fuck Discord.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ugh!

The worst part is, after wasting a bunch of time tracking down the correct Discord server to ask a question about a piece of software, you generally get lambasted by the "regulars" of that server to "just use the search feature, that's what it's for!"

Yeah, no. I don't want to wade through a reverse chronology of a bunch of conflicting back-and-forth conversations - just gimme a FAQ or some actual documentation!!!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Wikis are not really a defense against this issue, they are by nature a secondary or (occasionally by policy) a tertiary source of information. Once the source they are recording dies so does the value of that page on the wiki. From the OP:

54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There's nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they're collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it's just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.

And I believe that they could help a lot with this issue if people migrated/copied meaningful info from forums (like Lemmy) to wikis. Forums are good for discussion, but they tend to accumulate a lot of trash; having the good content sieved and sorted in a wiki makes it more accessible for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

There’s nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they’re collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it’s just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.

This is an accurate point. Thanks for the correction. I think what I should have said is that the biggest one has that policy and, as a result, there is a trend of others following suit.