How to easily archive websites to hold authors to account

[Cheesus]

It came up in another thread that an author had altered a blog in order to deflect valid criticisms. The trouble with this is that no one can prove the historical accuracy of the webpage, so it is easy for an author to feign ignorance of any changes, thereby evading justified criticism.

A simple way to combat this type of intellectual dishonesty is to archive a webpage. In doing so, you save the page exactly as it appears onto servers hosted by archive.org. The result is that future readers can prove the historical integrity of any given webpage.

A simple tool which allows you to do this is Wayback Machine - a browser extension you can add to Chrome, Firefox and perhaps others.

If ever you stumble across a new blog or publication or whatever, all you need to do to archive the webpage is click on the extension icon and select "Save Page Now". Then, if you ever need to prove the historical status of a page, you can again click the Wayback Machine icon and browse through any version of the page that has been saved previously. Multiple versions of pages can be saved, they are not overwritten.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wayback-machine_new/?src=ss

 

[Philipp]

This is actually really good to know. I always thought they just employ some sort of crawler and periodically archive as much as they can.

It is probably a good practice to do this to everything that could be useful to us. In the situation that came up in the other thread I was caught off guard by the change and did not even think it might possibly be useful to somehow archive the site in question (a research institute likely back-dated an abysmal report - I thought they would at least put in the already lazy effort of writing up some lame excuse).

 

[Cheesus]

Exhibit A: https://web.archive.org/web/2017091...ve-websites-to-hold-authors-to-account.54180/

 

[Mary]

I've seen Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) use the Wayback Machine as a means to keep politicians from rewriting history - great tool!

 

[Barry53]

Excellent! I've used Wayback Machine before, to access earlier versions of web pages, but did not realise there is a plugin to let you take snapshot of your own choosing - I thought it just crawled the web and made its own decisions what it archived. Goodness knows where it stores all that info.

 

[Hip]

If ever you stumble across a new blog or publication or whatever, all you need to do to archive the webpage is click on the extension icon and select "Save Page Now". Then, if you ever need to prove the historical status of a page, you can again click the Wayback Machine icon and browse through any version of the page that has been saved previously. Multiple versions of pages can be saved, they are not overwritten.

I think though people can request removal of Wayback Machine archives, so the owner of the archived website might be able to get it deleted from the Wayback Machine.