Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.
Internet
The Tragedy of Having a Wikipedia Page—and Then Losing It | WIRED
You Finally Got a Wikipedia Page. Then It Vanished
Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?
The EPA Is Quietly Killing its Web Archive – Mother Jones
While the usability of the archive has historically been far from perfect—researchers often encountered dead links and frustratingly limited search capabilities—the archive has held a trove of tens of thousands of EPA documents dating back to the 1990s simply not available elsewhere.
Academics have a duty to defend open knowledge systems like Wikipedia – LSE Impact
Academics are not the ones that have harmed Wikipedia, they – as fellow stewards of knowledge – have a duty to help defend it from those that have. And academics are well-equipped to do so; their subject matter expertise can be used to address content gaps, correct errors, and provide context on complicated topics on Wikipedia. Academics’ access to and facility with high-quality sources can help improve Wikipedia’s quality. And as Wikipedia’s citation practices mirror those academic practices, academics may find editing Wikipedia to be less daunting than others do.
Crawlers, floods and fleets: a year of keeping our digital collections open
I think anyone who runs a website is now going through the same thing. It is exhausting.
Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say | Nieman Journalism Lab
“This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”
Your browser is suspiciously without a Sec-Fetch-Mode header
It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse. There seem to be more and more crawlers, and they're getting past more precautions. One possible future for the web in the face of this is websites with less features, at least for the general public, because fewer features means less to crawl and less crawler impact. Another possible web future is one of pervasive gatekeepers that must be satisfied to allow you access to many or most websites.
Everyone’s Packing Up – Thoughts 💭 of Widdershins
I don't think the big platforms are going anywhere. But the people who made them interesting in the first place keep quietly walking out the side door, and writing a post about it on their way out. Which, I suppose, is what we're all doing here.
The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980 — DEC, Intel, and Xerox defined the standard several years before the internet existed | Tom’s Hardware
On this day in 1980, version 1.0 of the Ethernet specification was published by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Intel, and Xerox. This ‘DIX’ standard was established at a time still nearly three years before the modern internet existed. Nevertheless, Ethernet would become the default technology for connecting computers to each other in local networks – and all around the world. However, we must point out that Ethernet had existed in experimental form at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
This Was News: a time capsule of yesterday’s headlines | Disruptive Library Technology Jester
That project is This Was News, a website and social media bot that encourages people to reflect on the news that was. It seems (to me, at least) that the news cycle is winding faster and faster, which makes it easy to forget what the most important story of the day when it happened. One reasonable reaction to this is to tune out the news entirely. Another reaction would be to get periodic reminders of those stories, then be able to think about their impact after time has passed.
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