MarioWiki:Proposals

Establish a guideline for citing archived web pages
I've made a previous proposal about this in the past, but it was unnecessarily complicated. To put this as simply as possible, many online web pages are very likely to be taken down at some point, and many already have; a user may come across an online source which is no longer on the live web, and only exists on an online, the largest of which is the Wayback Machine.

To establish consistency when citing pages from these web archives, a guideline should be listed on Citations, below the template for citing live websites. This is what I believe is the best style to follow for such citations: cite the original, unmodified link to a page as usual, then include a statement in parentheses that lists the page as being archived, with a link to where the web archive hosts the page, a timestamp, and finally, the web archive which was sourced. Below is a template of such a citation (the link to the archived page would be accessed by the word "Archived"):

"Author Name (January 1, 2000). . Publisher. Retrieved January 1, 2023. ( June 1, 2022, 00:00:01 UTC via Web Archive.)"

As an example, the list of rumors and urban legends about Mario already uses this style for the majority of its web page citations. Here is an example from that page:

"Nintendo (1985). Super Mario Bros. Instruction Booklet. Retrieved July 8, 2021. (Archived March 9, 2021, 10:01:59 UTC via Wayback Machine.)"

A note should also be added to MarioWiki:Citations that the precise timestamp for a page from the Wayback Machine, the most common web archive source, can be found by examining the date in the URL; for the above example, 20210309100159 can be read as 2021-03-09 10:01:59, and should be formatted as March 9, 2021, 10:01:59 UTC.

To clarify the proposal, this should not be considered a strict rule that must be followed, nor a necessity for every citation of a web page, but simply as a guideline to follow in case a page has already been taken down, or if a link to an archived version of a page is being added to a citation.

Proposer: Deadline: June 1, 2023, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) Per proposal.
 * 2) Per proposal.
 * 3) Per everyone, as users might think they’re going into an active link when really they are led into a 404’d link
 * 4) Per all. Preservation is extremely important, and it'd seriously help if we pointed to archives when applicable.
 * 5) This is a great way to combat link rot and I strongly encourage more regular usage of archived pages regardless.
 * 6) Per all.
 * 7) Yes, please.
 * 8) Per all.
 * 9) Per all.
 * 10) per all

Comments
I am sick of these “active” links that are really dead or 404 links. This proposal acknowledges said statement of mine. 17:53, May 18, 2023 (EDT)

New features
None at the moment.

Removals
None at the moment.

Changes
None at the moment.

Miscellaneous
None at the moment.