Reason: Site as described is defunct; some kind informational site is at the URL now..
So, now ATT has to purge references to any site that missed upkeep of its domain or got PWN'ed? I don't see how this makes sense.
Topic on Forum:Wiki Talk
If there's no work left for a wiki reader to even consult, what purpose does a page serve? What value is there in it? No one can review the work, no one can find errors to correct or tropes to add. I should point out that the "informational site" has been at that URL for years. This isn't just "hey, they forgot to renew last week" -- the work is utterly gone, there's not even sufficient archivage in the Wayback Machine to point at.
I don't do this casually. I search for the work, both through Google and the Internet Archive. If a work still exists at a different site, or in the Wayback Machine, I'll point the page there, and have, numerous times. But a work that's utterly vanished? What's the point? As we say in the All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines, "Don't create a page for a work that no longer exists anywhere. You can't document a work that can't be consulted and studied, and other editors can't go and check it out. Don't do it.."
We're not here to catalog the simple fact that the work existed once -- we're here to analyze living works and how they're constructed. If works that no longer exist deserve pages, then hell, so do works that never existed and are entirely imaginary. Both have exactly the same amount of content to study.
> If there's no work left for a wiki reader to even consult, what purpose does a page serve?
For one, there's analysis already done: examples on the work pages and context for examples on trope pages referring to the works.
"Don't create pages for completely inaccessible things" makes perfect sense. But beyond that...
While in specific cases this may be no great loss, there are many silly pitfalls on this road, especially without explicit policy/guidelines (if there were any, this should be linked in the template).
Did this or that work really "utterly vanish"? Should we wipe and then restore as sites go down and then are restored? How quickly should we wipe anything? What if it was removed by a malicious party - censored from a hosting service or hacked? And do we know for sure? And there maybe left no e.g. BK-0010 or VIC 20 one could readily buy, either. Why have pages for them?
Tagging pages for all vanished web works so that the readers immediately know this (a template and a mark in Laconic, if any, would do) is a good idea, however.
> > If there's no work left for a wiki reader to even consult, what purpose does a page serve?
> For one, there's analysis already done: examples on the work pages and context for examples on trope pages referring to the works.
Without the context to consult, what good is that? What value is there to say something "You can see how this trope is executed perfectly in chapter 4" if chapter 4 no longer exists to read?
> Should we wipe and then restore as sites go down and then are restored?
Why not? MediaWiki, like Pepperidge Farm, remembers. If the site reappears, we just undelete the page. It's not like deleting the page utterly destroys it and its history, never to return.
"Don't create a page for a work that no longer exists anywhere."
On a more serious note, City of Reality is down and has been for a while. The creator claims to have a backup on his Deviantart, but that was a year ago and I can't find anything else about it. Web archive has the frame, but none of the actual content (the comic). Would the claim of backup save it? Also Doctor_Who/Recap/S1/E04_Marco_Polo
Over on the other wiki where I have mod rights, we have a tag "Unavailable" that indicates a particular free download isn't to be found legally anywhere - even in the Wayback Machine. But we keep the pages for these items because somebody might have copies of them saved locally, and might need to reference things like the re-use license terms or the name of the download's creator. And rarely - very rarely - something becomes available legally again; having the page means we don't need to re-do all the investigative work from scratch.
Bringing that idea here: Sometimes books go out of print, movies get put into "the vault", and websites disappear - but there are still copies out there. Less often, works come back. Why not keep the data that we've already turned into information? Besides, disk space is relatively cheap nowadays.
I think this is a matter of personal judgement in terms of whether we are certain a work is missing and will be, if we know that it's merely "in stasis" we can keep it, if we know it is fully destroyed we have to act accordingly.
I'm completely in favor of deleting works that don't actually exist btw.
Okay, based on comments here and over at the DW forums, where I raised the question, I've worked up a potential "missing work" template, which you can find at template:MIA, naturally enough. Rather than nuke pages that seem worthless to me, I will flag them with this template. Please feel free to refine the language.
We do have a policy on this already: it's ATT:UNPUB. When I was writing it, I didn't intend to extend it to works that are no longer published, but I don't see why not. It's a synonym for unpublished with a slightly different meaning.
When websites disappear, and they aren't hosted in the Archive, then for all intents and purposes it no longer exists. It's not like an out-of-print book -- copies of those might well exist. Or if not, maybe some criticism of the work still exists, like of classical era works. Are we losing valuable criticism of some work that future historians will want? This is why notability is the standard in this case. Though I'd say our definition of notability is more like "still has a decent sized-fandom/can find at least few blog entries about the original story."
Now, to bring back up the specific case that TBeholder cited, Valenth is/was a website. I've made the suggestion before that we treat websites as something other than works, because they are almost always repositories of multiple works, and themselves demonstrate only the smallest of trope lists with the most general of tropes, but let's ignore that for the moment..
With Valenth, we're talking something that was a community with what our article claimed was some 100K members, doing some kind of mons-like thing. But that was in 2008 -- ten freakin' years ago. That community and that website are gone, completely. Five minutes' checking with the Wayback Machine confirms that it wasn't just forgetting to re-up their domain reg or getting pwned -- they closed down between January and April of 2014. (Apparently with very little notice, as they were still soliciting new members on the top page in January.) This was then displayed at the website for six months:
Valenth Closed
Valenth is now closed. You can find new content from DNA and Sixar at Leupak.com including an exciting Valentines event!
After which a completely different site -- "VALENTH - Everything On Educational Books, Software and Games" -- appeared at that domain. (That "Valentine's event" suggests it may have shut down mere days after the January copy was archived.)
And BTW, that new site given in the closure notice? Currently an Asian sports site. Nothing at all on it that looks like the old Valenth. Tracking it through the Wayback Machine shows posts from the creator of Valenth complaining essentially of burnout, and never quite implementing anything that looked like the earlier site. And then the new site vanishes in the middle of 2016, to be replaced a few months later by that sports site.
Setting aside the idea that a website isn't a work in and of itself, Valenth simply does not exist in any form that matches that decade-old description. The Wayback Machine essentially saved only the top pages -- if there is any surviving content, I could not find it during my (admittedly brief) investigations. But when every link off a couple different versions of the top page returns a site database error or the Wayback Machine's "oops, we don't have that" message, I think it's reasonable to come to that conclusion.
So someone please tell me -- what value is provided, what purpose is served by keeping a description of something that sounds like a cool place to hang and play, but which doesn't exist any more, and the link to which takes you to someplace that's going to try to sell you something? This is not like a lost fanfic, which may yet still lurk on someone's hard drive somewhere. It's not coming back, ever.
It is this sort of thing that makes my Grind My Teeth whenever I hear the phrase "The Internet Is Forever".
It isn't. Even the Sphinx was forgotten & buried for long centuries. 0s & 1s on delicate delicate electronics are far more Ephemeral. There is a reason gov't and such still use magnetic tape for bulk data backup. So many websites i've enjoyed have vanished in part or in whole & even the archive isn't enough sometimes. I recall that artist Mangrowing lost all the art to his comic Ayane bug Story sequel (only 1-2 pages were saved elsewhere) due to Deviantart deleting it since Ayane was "underage". There was a text version of the story, but he didnt want to redraw it sadly
Yeah, "The Internet Is Forever" is complete bull. I'm sure all of us have seen corporate entities deleting web content for any of a million reasons, most of which boil down to "it costs us less that way". And I used to admire the Wayback Machine, until I needed to retrieve a lot of material from it (both for this wiki and my own forums) and realized that it's almost a Potemkin Village version of the Web. By which I mean that unless your site is less than a couple levels deep, a lot of it will never be archived. And if your site is too wide -- like a wiki, with thousands of pages at the top level -- it's never going to get around to everything on it.
That said, I'm letting people know I'm nuking our page on Valenth. Because outside of the initial reactionary "how dare you delete something!" objection, no one has provided me in the last sixteen days with any justification for keeping it. Because unlike a lost fanfic, no one is going to have this entire website stored somewhere on a floppy disk from which they can just restore it for the rest of the web to enjoy.