Help talk:Using WebCite

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Moved from User talk:Blargh29 Some questions - I realise these aren't necessarily your responsibility to sort out, but I'd like to see the answers on the summary page:

• What's the longevity of the WebCite archive - do they have a guarantee that in the event of their shutting down they'll make their repository available for others to mirror, or some similar arrangement?
• Why is it better for me to plug links through WebCite manually rather than have a bot do it across all of Wikipedia? (If the answer is that more bot herders/coders are needed, I'm happy to help)
• Are there particular classes of links that are more worth doing than others, or is this something that we should be moving to applying to every link on Wikipedia?

Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There probably isn't any guarantee of longevity, but it is supported by a large number of academic organizations and journals, who have an interest in making sure it survives for a while. I would check with User:ThaddeusB, who is the coder for User talk:WebCiteBOT about any bot or coding questions. Yes! I think this should be very widespread.--Blargh29 (talk) 04:52, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The question is addressed on their website at http://www.webcitation.org/faq although it would be good to know what RS have to say about its future. Шизомби (Sz) (talk) 02:59, 6 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I know this is an old thread, but as to question 3, I'd suggest that it should be done throughout Wikipedia, but to the extent there's a bottleneck, priority should probably go to peer-reviewed content such as FA, FL, A-class articles, GA, etc. cmadler (talk) 14:12, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This essay appeared in the November 23, 2009 version of the Wikipedia Signpost, available at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-23/News and notes.--Blargh29 (talk) 18:47, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have concerns with the 2nd form (no "real" address in the citation, just an internal identifier).

1. If such a citation is used for a quote, are we treating the copyright-holder reasonably?
2. Very low or very high credibility websites may be made to appear more or less credible to a casual reader.
3. 2nd form also puts us, IMO, at great risk of losing the citation completely should this service go under: I am concerned that we won't have any way to match their internal number to a web address.

I am dubious of the wisdom of allowing the 2nd form as a standard practice, or at all.- Sinneed 16:34, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I believe #1 is not an issue in terms of copyright law; we are linking to something which has all the same copyright/metadata of the original. It's a little less transparent, but not much different from, say, writing a blockquote and linking [[Samuel Clemens|Mark Twain]] - in both some alias or indirection is being used which is not itself the copyright holder. And just the domain name or URL may provide no information - who's the copyright holder of twitter.com/foo1677?

#2 is no worse than the status quo; one can always use or run one's own URL redirect service, or make use of user-supplied areas of otherwise-reputable websites.

#3 is a real issue. I don't know of any way to match ID->URL except through WebCite. This isn't a big deal with the Internet Archive, because there it is just 'ia.com+URL'. This is probably a good enough reason to mandate that if the hex is used, the original url= field must be filled. --Gwern (contribs) 17:21 28 January 2010 (GMT)

Maybe it's just me...but I'm having issues retrieving WebCite-enabled archives. (Mainly slow performance—there's no 404 error, but the page doesn't load.) For example [1] & [2] (otherwise linked at Eric Tillman). Anyone else seeing the same symptoms? TheFeds 23:22, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As of today, WebCite links are failing, and webcitation.org lists the message: "WebCite is currently under maintenance. We will be back up soon." TheFeds 23:19, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In view of WebCite outages (and see Talk:WebCite#WebCite down again today) perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation might consider starting its own Web archiving service specifically to support Wikipedia. Without a reliable Web archiving service, we can expect many if not most original external links in Wikipedia citations to rot eventually, and this would degrade the value of Wikipedia. --Teratornis (talk) 16:40, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be down again, as of now. TheFeds 07:33, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some web sites of reliable sources -- in particular, Gannett Company newspapers -- use a page formatting system that doesn't work with with WebCite. See, for instance, this article and the corresponding WebCite archive. It's a two-page article, but the two pages are not coded as separate web pages, and whatever coding allows the user on the live site to switch between Page 1 and Page 2 doesn't work in the archive version. And since there's no separate URL for page 2, there's no way to get WebCite to archive it. Is there anything we can do to better archive these sorts of pages? Powers ^T 19:24, 16 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is this not working for anybody else? Till 06:27, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Confirmed that the page is not archiving new requests at the moment. The page is hopefully working in a few hours/days again. mabdul 08:24, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's working fine now. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 05:55, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please come participate in this discussion: meta:WebCite. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 19:03, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I created User:UBX/WebCite2 (used on your userpage as {{User:UBX/WebCite2}}) to help raise awareness of the need for donations. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 11:34, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

From WebCitation.org: "WebCite will stop accepting new submissions end of 2013, unless we reach our fundraising goals to modernize and expand this service." Links to FundRazr.com campaign for it here. Their fundraising will have to more than double its current rate or the goal will not be reached. I donated. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 11:56, 16 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please let it die. WebCite makes sharing links difficult. I can't tell you how many times I've copy-pasted "http://www.webcitation.org/mainframe.php" and groaned. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.230.177.44 (talk) 23:18, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish: If it does die, what will we do? Will we change all the links to Archive.org? benzband (talk) 00:14, 5 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Link here in case WebCite goes dead. It's the one on the right marked Save Page Now. Philafrenzy (talk) 01:03, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I use this every chance I get. Even though the site has billions of pages saved, about 50% of what I find on the web while working on articles is not yet in archive.org, though about a third of that or so cannot be archived due to disallowances or paywalls. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 21:01, 23 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Internet Archive is scanning diffs extracting URLs and archving them automatically. Usually happens within a day. Across all language wikis. It's been pretty reliable. Started around 2016. -- GreenC 18:05, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think one of the things which might weigh heavily on WebCite and suck funding from its main purpose for existence is our (and others) treating it as an all-purpose archive. Unfortunately, this is not what WebCite was intended to be; rather, as explained in the FAQ in the section "What is the goal of the WebCite® consortium?": Digital archiving of webpages or websites which are referenced in scholarly journal articles, therefore preserving the scholarly record and our cultural heritage for future generations.... The next sentence goes on to say "Beyond these broader objectives...", but the message does not stray from the core purpose. This focus of WebCite is not indicated in our Wikipedia instructions to users, and I think it should be. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 15:45, 8 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In what way do you feel we are not using it as intended? Philafrenzy (talk) 16:59, 8 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

People tend to use it for items outside of the scope of scholarly publishing, such as news articles as one example. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 20:50, 23 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, WebCite has previous asked Wikipedia to use the service. --ThaddeusB (talk) 18:52, 23 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That is ok for instance when wikipedia cites a peer reviewed paper and there is a need to archive a copy of the paper or an online page mentioned in the paper, but not OK when it comes to archiving a web page with a sports team roster or a snapshot of a corporate information page. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 20:50, 23 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Considering I worked with the site's founder on User:WebCiteBOT and he never mentioned anything about restricting the type of pages covered, I'm pretty sure WebCite either doesn't care one way or another or wants every link archived (which was the intent of the bot). --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:28, 24 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Should we mention archive.today? --Ysangkok (talk) 13:29, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There's a page Help:Using archive.today, which is also mentioned at Help:Archiving a source. —⁠andrybak (talk) 19:59, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I keep getting the above error message. Is www.webcitation.org still in business? Mksword (talk) 19:16, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me. Trying clearing browser cache. -- GreenC 21:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some of my recent archiving efforts have yielded blank results, as evidenced here. Does anyone know what's happening? --Kailash29792 (talk) 04:15, 7 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Noticed it also a few days ago. Not sure what's happening. It's probably on their end, but did you give them a working email address and check if they sent anything like a verification request before the archive goes live? -- GreenC 04:34, 7 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I can't even get to their home page, yet downforeveryoneorjustme on both my phone and home WiFi is claiming they're up. -- RoySmith (talk) 19:36, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me right now but it's been said it doesn't always work for everyone all the time. It would be interesting to try a traceroute from your network and see where it stops. -- GreenC 21:11, 6 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unable to replay anything past few days. Example not working, says 'unable to connect to DB' and 'Too many connections in /home/webcita/public_html/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 367'. @Cyberpower678: -- GreenC 00:41, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seems the whole site is down. – Kaihsu (talk) 12:58, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Kaihsu: Tracking outage here. -- GreenC 01:12, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Using Safari Version 11.1.2 with Norton Internet Security on an iMac desktop, I get the following message:

The "Full Report" includes:

This is an FYI. I'm not sure if anything should be done by Wikipedians. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:40, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

RfC open at: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#RfC:_Deprecate_webcitation.org_aka_WebCite -- GreenC 14:50, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@GreenC: Looks like the RfC was archived: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_159#RfC:_Deprecate_webcitation.org_aka_WebCite just wanted to add a link in case anyone was looking for the discussion (like I was :)).

Jewell D D (talk) 21:43, 1 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Being that WebCite stopped accepting requests, shouldn't most of page should be deleted?Yaakovaryeh (talk) 04:03, 9 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What's the alternative to webcitation? Bennylin (talk) 14:04, 3 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

nvm, found it on WP:WEBARCHIVES via here. Bennylin (talk) 14:07, 3 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The top of this Talk page states "As of October 27, 2021, previously archived pages cannot be accessed." but this does not seem to be correct. I just tried both long format URLs of the examples given here (to example.com) and both were still available.

Although I did choose to leave out the www subdomain, because the webcitation.org TLS certificate is only valid for that domain and not for any subdomains. Visiting www.webcitation.org may give safety warnings or even prevent the browser from going there, depending on your browser setup. MichielN (talk) 11:32, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Outages tracked here. It was down for about 20 months then came back online. Interesting about TLS and sub-domain didn't know that thanks. -- GreenC 15:12, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]