Talk:WebCite

When was it launched?

The article seems to get no closer on this than "By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite". I take it from that that WebCite launched either earlier in 2008 or in 2007, but I'd be guessing. Can someone pin this one down, and also correct the establishment by year categories that I'm adding now with 2008 as the tentative year of establishment! __meco (talk) 08:47, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

The IA first records WC in late 2003; by 2004 it was apparently archiving stuff. --Gwern (contribs) 17:34 17 October 2010 (GMT)

Google?

The article says, "Shortly thereafter, Google and the Internet Archive entered the market, seemingly reducing the need for a service like WebCite."

Really? If Google is in this market, I'm not aware of it. Old versions of web pages can sometimes be found in the Google cache, but they don't last long.

Does anyone know what that sentence is talking about? NCdave (talk) 11:57, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

No I don't, but I'm adding {{Cn-span|. You could search the Page History, and ask the editor(s), who added/edited that sentence. Lentower (talk) 18:23, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Service outages

2010-04-03: Down

For the last half-hour or so and continuing. -- Tenebrae (talk) 02:20, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

We really don't need to be told about each and every bit of downtime. --Gwern (contribs) 18:08 12 January 2010 (GMT)

It's again down (yesterday and now). Is there any reports on it by secondary sources? Nsaa (talk) 08:47, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Because it's heavily relied on by editors, relatively minor downtime coverage here (on the talk page) is appropriate that would be inappropriate in the article, IMHO. For example the site currently displays "Website is currently under maintenance. Its being migrated to a new powerful server. We will be back up soon." It's helpful to have this logged. --Elvey (talk) 02:58, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Why is mentioning whether WebCite is up or down on this page better than getting that info by visiting WebCite itself?--Father Goose (talk) 15:36, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Because by coming here, one could get some idea of how long it was down. Of course a monitoring service would be better. It was down for about a week. Not worth arguing over further, IMO.--Elvey (talk) 20:22, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Also these reports are a sanity check, to let editors know the access problem is not unique to them. Sometimes a person cannot see a Web site because of a limited network problem, when the site is still visible to other people. --Teratornis (talk) 16:39, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

2010-06-21: Down

In that case, it's been down all day June 20, parts of June 19 (or more), and so far on June 21 (today), it's still down. If it's down for more than a week, I'm screwed lol. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 06:45, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

2010-11-13: Down

Section originally titled "outage (extended or "repeated" outage?) Nov. 2010"

It has been about a week since this comment was posted: Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Webcite_outage.3F_.28.3F.29 and it seems to be down again. (On the other hand, the Google "cache" entry is now dated Nov 13, 2010 ... Hmmm ... on 9 November 2010 the Google "cache" entry was dated Nov 6, 2010.) (Could it just be a DNS problem with my ISP? or my subnet? or my PC, or something?)

The current problem seems to be affecting "read-only" access to previously archived material, (at least, for me! YMMV...) as well as submission of new material to be archived. Does anyone here have any details about the problem? (e.g., is it a "domain name" issue? or a DNS / domain name "registration" issue?) --Mike Schwartz (talk) 07:37, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, it worked OK for me today. (Go figure ... :-) --Mike Schwartz (talk) 06:28, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

2011-01-19: E-mail notification down

E-mail notification does not seem to work since early January 2011 (and is not back as of Jan. 8th 2011). So, please be careful, if you use the bookmarklet instead of bookmarking visited sites otherwise. Links might get lost. I second the call for a monitoring service or more reliable alternatives. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Webciteuser01 (talk • contribs) 09:58, 8 January 2011 (UTC) Seems to be back on January 19th. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Webciteuser01 (talk • contribs) 18:51, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

2011-05-16: Down

Its down again. The Website cannot get reached. Thank You Webcitation people for your service all the years until now! --Advocado 11:32, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

2011-09-01: Down

The google cache of Aug 29, 2011 16:37:55 GMT shows a normal-looking home page, but i have got no server response for the past 10 minutes or so. The DNS servers for webcitation.org seem to be down. Boud (talk) 20:34, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Ditto. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 21:37, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

I also cannot access webcitation.org since yesterday. --Teratornis (talk) 16:29, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

I have not been able to retrieve old snapshots for several days until I today read this meassage on their site; "Sep 6, 2011 - On Sep 3rd (just before the long labor day weekend), WebCite went down due to a hardware failure. While we are restoring the database from our backups, no new snapshots can be made, and old snapshots may be temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience caused". Hopefully they will be back up soon :-/ Froztbyte (talk) 18:16, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

2012-05-17: Down briefly

I think there is some value in documenting the outages. It was down for a brief period this afternoon, at least around 1:00pm. It was working by 3:00pm. The Sound and the Fury (talk) 19:08, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

2012-06-07: Down

Seems to be down again, as of now. (This message is for informational purposes, and is not a call to document downtime in the article itself.) TheFeds 07:37, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Seems to be down either ongoing or again --Webciteuser01 (talk) 13:33, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

and back, now.--Webciteuser01 (talk) 15:07, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

2012-10-24: Down

Down right now with the error "Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Too many connections in /home/webcita/public_html/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 367 DB Connection failed" on the archive page. (Again, not advocating for listing outages in article; this is merely a convenient list for us to track the issue.) TheFeds 07:46, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

2013-01-15: Down

Service down with a note mentioning "routine maintenance", but ongoing for quite a while now. Webciteuser01 (talk) 10:43, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Still seems to be down early 17th Jan Lantrix //Talk//Contrib// 13:30, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

And it's back and available! Great, thanks WebCite for your service! To my knowledge maintenance took at least 48h. Webciteuser01 (talk) 14:01, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

2013-02-08: Was down, could be out

Earlier today, webcitation.org seemed to be dead. It's now up and running, but is appealing for funds in order to survive. -- Hoary (talk) 14:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The article says the funding target is $250,000, but the source says it's $50,000. I have corrected/updated this. Does anyone know what happened? Hans Adler 16:11, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

2013-02-12: Down

No response from server as of 12:15 GMT.   — C M B J   12:16, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

2013-09-06: Down

No response from server as of 10:15 CEST Webciteuser01 (talk) 08:20, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

2014-12-04: Read-only

WebCite has been no longer able to archive anything for almost a week, becoming read-only. -- Meow 20:18, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

It seems to be archiving things at this time. Archive requests often time out on submittal, but always seem to complete anyway (often before getting the time out message even). Lookups seem instantaneous. --ThaddeusB (talk) 18:53, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Outages

The latest anodyne edit does much to improve webcite's image, but understates the very serious and almost continuous non function of an important archiving service. It's one thing to claim new pages will not be archived if funds aren't received, it's another to fail to support an existing commitment. I think outages should be given more prominent coverage than the latest edit by Philafrenzy allows, though perhaps in a more organised manner. The intention is not carping, but documenting a serious problem. I support the service and have given to it, despite the lack of transparency in its funding arrangements, but I am frustrated by its massive unreliability at present, and a lack of clarity about what the future holds. Cpsoper (talk) 22:30, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I will try to make my edits less anodyne. I agree with most of what you say and find it an invaluable service. I hope we don't lose it but a blow by blow account of outages, which generally don't last long and cause no loss of data, doesn't seem encyclopaedic. It's a free service that is only 99% reliable, not 100%. Seems reasonable. Philafrenzy (talk) 23:41, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Meta proposal

See meta:WebCite for related discussion.   — C M B J   13:52, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Outage 2015-08-08

It's down again. It was accepting new material about two weeks ago (the last time I tried).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:31, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Outage 2015-11-15

When attempting to access material archived in WebCite or while attempting to archive new materials, I am receiving an error message that states:

Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Too many connections in /home/webcita/public_html/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 367 DB Connection failed.

Is anyone else currently experiencing this problem? What is creating the problem? When will it be fixed?

Should an editor add information about this outage and previous WebCite outages to the WebCite article? Corker1 (talk) 23:38, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

• The 2015-11-15 outage was corrected on 2015-11-16. Corker1 (talk) 20:51, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

2016-05-31: Having trouble archiving pages

I've tried to archive multiple articles today and I keep getting the following email error message:

Your WebCite archive request has errors

Your recent WebCite request has completed. Following are the results from this request:

CACHING FAILED

The caching attempt failed for the following reason: Could not establish the root of the downloaded page. This is most likely caused by a page class which isn't supported yet by WebCite.

Anyone else getting this? It was working fine for me a few days ago last time I tried to archive a page. --Jamesy0627144 (talk) 02:16, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

[update 2016-06-04] I am able to archive pages now and no longer receive an error message when doing so, but the formatting of the archived pages is off (text is all there but archive doesn't look much like original) and there is also a big banner across the top of webcitation.org that says "UNDER CONSTRUCTION - please come back later - old snapshots available". So looks like they are aware of the problems and working on it but it's not completely fixed yet. --Jamesy0627144 (talk) 20:29, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

2017-10-29: Site appears to be down

I keep getting an error saying the site cannot be reached. Using ping also shows that the host cannot be found. 2601:8C:4102:1210:96C:E069:7919:EF79 (talk) 17:33, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

2018-09-20: Site down

Is It Down Right Now?. Yes. It was intermittently down starting yesterday (if not the day before). -- GreenC 15:08, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

2018-11-25: Site down

Right now it's down and has been since yesterday. I hope that doesn't mean it's been down since September. There was no report of it coming back up. SpinningSpark 09:06, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Back up today. SpinningSpark 10:29, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

• @Eysen: I've started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 27#WebCite. SpinningSpark 12:44, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

2019-06-10

Major problems. Down. No DNS. Both authoritative name servers seem to be down. Blocklisted by Google: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=http://69.73.131.148/

% dig short webcitation.org NS ns1.webcitens.org. ns2.webcitens.org. % dig webcitation.org @NS1.WEBCITENS.ORG ; dig webcitation.org @NS2.WEBCITENS.ORG <fail - no answer>

--68.33.78.5 (talk) 15:58, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

IsItDown? reports it has been down for more than a week. Surprising it took that long for anyone at Enwiki to notice, it is possible. -- GreenC 16:59, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

According to the WaybackMachine, the last time it was known to work was June 6, though could be later. -- GreenC 01:18, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Webcitation is hosted at Network Transit Holdings, other sites hosted there are working so it is not an ISP outage or DOS attack etc. It looks like the DNS zones are disappeared for some reason (also hosted at Network Transit Holdings). -- GreenC 17:26, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Blacklisted rather than blocklisted, unfortunately. Webcitation needs support if it's to become a long-term sustainable organisation rather than a one(?)-person effort. Better to have several archiving alternatives available than only archive.org and archive.wikiwix.org. As of 2019-06-22, Webcitation is still down - that makes 16 days. A big fraction of our RS's are no longer easily verifiable in archival form. :( Boud (talk) 12:06, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

@Boud: There is an open RfC see last comment on this page. -- GreenC 13:13, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I shot an email to [email protected] asking about WebCite's status on the 23rd and then neglected to check it until today since others here seemed to indicate emails inquiring about WebCite are never replied to. There was a reply on the 25th: "Thank you for reaching out. Our Development Team is working on getting webcition.org working again for us. I apologize for the inconvenience. Once I hear back from the team, I will reach back out. With reference to citing online references, you can just use the URL. Our instructions for authors are being updated to reflect this." So I suppose it's not totally left for dead yet. —Undead Shambles (talk) 16:15, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Name checks out :) Thanks Undead Shambles. -- GreenC 20:53, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

It's back up!--Truthtests (talk) 22:06, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Although I think it no longer archives sources. Or now what is the way? Kailash29792 (talk) 03:31, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

At the moment that's true. There is a banner at the top that reads, "We are currently not accepting archiving requests. The archival state/snapshots of websites that have been archived with WebCite in the past can still be accessed and cited." No indication on how long this will be true.--Truthtests (talk) 22:39, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

2021-08-19

Outage started early in the day. -- GreenC 00:48, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

1 month later and its still down. Maybe they don't know its down? Anyone tried the jmir email to see if they responded? Rlink2 (talk) 18:04, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

At the time they came back up from the last outage, in July 2019, they had moved ISP from Network Transit Holdings to AWS. That might explain the lengthy outage back then, to migrate. They are still on AWS according to whois records, and AWS server's don't crash, so something else going on this time. -- GreenC 18:49, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

The maintenance thing on the webpage has changed slightly, so they are definitely doing some sort of work (before: https://archive.is/xxkKt). Now the jmir info is removed and it just says "under maintence" with nothing else? Rlink2 (talk) 00:41, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Service restored October 8 for an outage of 1 month 21 days -- GreenC 20:19, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

2021-10-27

Outage began. Snapshot URLs return error, unable to connect to DB. Home page works. -- GreenC 15:13, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

Still the case today. "DB Connection failed" error message when trying to retrieve snapshot URLs. Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 20:13, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Almost three months later, still no WebCite archive loads. All say "DB Connection failed". Kailash29792 (talk) 06:16, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I have some information, can not share other than to say until the main site goes offline we should give them more time to try and resolve their problem, both technical and financial. In the mean time, highly encourage manually changing links you care about, manually, to another provider. WebCite has a lot of content drift problems so it should be done with care, manually verifying the new archive matches the cited material. -- GreenC 16:48, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Still the same error, "DB Connection failed". Home page works. I noticed that the error appears after the page loads for a while. I also noticed that any snapshot URL has some sort of security certificate issue (according to Google Chrome). Meltdown627 (talk) 22:13, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

It appears to have come back online around June 24, 2023. 1 year 8 months outage. -- GreenC 15:47, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

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. -- GreenC 15:13, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

2024-05-01

The site went offline around May 1, 2024. The homepage does not display, browsers hang indefinitely, then time out. -- GreenC 15:51, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

It's online as of today (or maybe a few days earlier). May 13. -- GreenC 02:47, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

general problem

Hello from german Wikipedia. I think, webcitation shall not be used at all, regardless of being up or down. Look at the following example:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20131203023221/https://www.webcitation.org/6Hxf1UzIx december 2013
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230927165352/https://www.webcitation.org/6Hxf1UzIx september 2023

Both have the same hash in the webcitation link, but the one from dec. 2013 has an archived version of www.cleveland.com whereas the archived version 2023 shows www.jamboree.freedom-in-education.co.uk

I found that example when trying to fix a very different problem in de:Zyklonsaison im Südwestindik 2013–2014 where I see a title Bulletin for Cyclonic Activity and Significant Tropical Weather in the Southwest Indian Ocean – July 6, 2013 1200 UTC so I was expecting a page with that title. According to deWP, this link was added in july 2013. So within 5 month (july till december) the webcitation-link changed its content.

Another example:

• according to the same page in deWP, I expect a title Cyclone Warning 001 for Tropical Disturbance 02 Link was added december, 16th 1013 14:51 UTC (timestamp in deWP-database is 20131216145137)
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131216193524/http://www.webcitation.org/6LscMBxZu version from same day, 20131216193524 5 minutes later(!!) the link is different
• https://web.archive.org/web/20141221162405/http://www.webcitation.org/6LscMBxZu Okay, a year later the link is different again.

I think we can simple forget this site and drop all the links, or did I miss something? --Wurgl (talk) 09:53, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

You didn't miss anything. The problem you discovered is unintentionally caused by the way WebCite and Wayback interact due to their designs. As background, a page capture is composed of multiple files, like HTML, .JPG, etc.. it's many files that render on the screen to look like a single page. WebCite uses a convoluted system of Frames, so each WebCite page uses the same "file": mainframe.php (seen in view-source:https://www.webcitation.org/6LscMBxZu .. really a source file that produces output). On the Wayback side, they have a duplicate file reduction mechanism, it assumes any file from the same domain is going to be the same, regardless of which page it's used on. Thus 456hyer89.jpg is the same file on multiple web pages and it only needs to be saved one time. The problem with WebCite is mainframe.php is not the same content each time. But it's invisible to Wayback. So each time a WebCite page is saved at Wayback, the content of mainframe.php changes and all other WebCite captures change with it! It's terrible. I've talked to the archive about this, but they have not responded, because I think it's so specific to the convoluted design of WebCite.

Long story short, use archive.today to correctly save WebCite. They found a way. -- GreenC 03:49, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Oho! I see. Really strange. Does InternetArchiveBot know about this problem and avoid suggesting archive.org as an archive for webcitation? In March '23 it did happily suggest web.archive.org. --Wurgl (talk) 06:00, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Normally no it would not add a double-archive to WebCite. But in this situation there are two factors. First is that on March 2023 WebCite was down and had been down for over a year so the bot was unable to resolve what the original source URL was for the WebCite short code 69vr7lZeu (which is why on enwiki we have a policy to not use URL short codes such as at WebCite it would be changed to http://www.webcitation.org/69vr7lZeu?url=http://www.msrintranet.capmas.gov.eg/pls/census/cnsest_a_sex_ama?LANG=1&lname=1&YY=2006&cod=15&gv= so the original URL is knowable even if the archive provider is offline). The other factor is the bot didn't add the WebCite URL it only moved it around inside the citation template which normally requires the source URL in the url field and the archive URL in the archive field. These two factors combined to see that behavior. -- GreenC 17:04, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

"Indefinite preservation"?

I removed the use of the term "indefinite preservation" from the lead as unverifiable. We do not know that this service will exist forever. Unless such a guarantee can be made - and it can't - the phrase "indefinite" cannot be used. Indeed, the lengthy list of outages above proves the service is not 100% reliable and, thus, once again indefinite cannot apply. As a non-profit, it could close down a year from now, 5 years from now, or a server crash could delete everything. It's a claim that simply cannot be verified, so I tweaked the wording slightly. 68.146.70.124 (talk) 06:50, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Indefinite does not mean forever. It just means that no end date has been set. Of course no one can guarantee that information will exist forever, but having indefinite preservation as an intention and policy is perfectly reasonable. The issue of server outages is not very relevant. Server availability and safety of data are two very different things. SpinningSpark 09:11, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

IMHO the first paragraph above -- [date/time stamped "06:50, 11 November 2013 (UTC)"] -- raises an interesting point. The information recently added at Talk:WebCite#2019-06-10 seems relevant in this regard. During my frustration with the most recent outage of the WebCite web site, I found this very OLD page of comments -- (posted circa 2007) -- and it seems insightful and perhaps a little bit prescient ... and it may be relevant to the topic of this section of this "Talk:" page.

(PS: [maybe "TMI"? sorry...] Over the past few days I have noticed that the web site https://webcitation.org/ did not [and it still does not] seem to be working at all; and what seemed especially frustrating was: the lack of even an "info" / "status" web page ... e.g. to re-direct readers [temporarily?] to some "news" updates ... which probably "should be" hosted / DNS'ed separately on some other web site! [right?] Just my 0.02 ...) --Mike Schwartz (talk) 18:03, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

RfC: long or short URL

RfC open if we should use long or short URLs when linking to webcitation.org -- GreenC 23:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

RfC: Deprecate webcitation.org aka WebCite

RfC open at: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_159#RfC:_Deprecate_webcitation.org_aka_WebCite -- GreenC 14:50, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Change language in article to past tense?

With almost all content on WebCite having been unavailable since the end of October 2021, barring the front page, FAQ, and news page, is it now appropriate to change all language in this article to past tense? Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:34, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Probably a good idea. If by some fate it returns, the past tense can be rolled back. Gunther has not added a status update in 9 months just letting archive requests time-out with a db error. Other things are broken like icon images, or pages like https://webcitation.org/mailform .. the site it appears to be abandoned and falling apart. -- GreenC 21:37, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

I've now changed the language to past tense in the article, with a slight copy edit for prose. I'm somewhat tempted to remove the Usage section, as it doesn't seem to add much encyclopaedic knowledge, and Wikipedia is not a manual. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:14, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Great work. Wayback Machine and Archive.today don't have usage sections. There is Help:Using WebCite as a guide to usage. -- GreenC 04:59, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I've removed the usage section in this edit. Sideswipe9th (talk) 20:07, 12 August 2022 (UTC)