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Forums  ForumsTen Forward → Geocities going down (replywatch)

Discussion

So geocities is going down by the end of the year [1] (or sooner). We have a lot of links that go there - especially related to background information by Berman and Moore and other such people. I'm sure we can't archive the information here nor am I sure we can archive the information elsewhere. What should we do? — Morder 07:48, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Searching for "geocities" leads to only four results for me, added below. We'd need a relatively complete list to see what we can (or need to) do about that. -- Cid Highwind 10:21, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Cid, this may be of more use. There are currently 316 links to Geocities pages (some point to the same page). My suggestion is to check whether the Wayback Machine holds a copy of the relevant webpages, and either replace them with a link to that, or simply use the brokenurl template unless/until replaced (as that adds a link to the WBM). -- Michael Warren | Talk 10:42, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I've posted all the links below (including dupes). They still exist - The way back machine sucks...can we store them somewhere else? Because they don't always contain the most recent copy. — Morder 10:48, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the links, and thanks for reminding me of that Special: page... totally forgot that. :)
Anyway, I think we should first check whether some page is actually a "resource" for us, or just a random "external link". As just one example, this page not only does the same we do (process information from the shows), it also hasn't been modified during the last eleven(!) years. Is that really worth keeping? I'd say, go through the list and remove pages that don't offer any first-hand information. Then let's deal with the rest (the Moore interviews, for example) in a second step. -- Cid Highwind 11:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I've archived every single page that is still available pending what we decide to do...the moore files are the more important ones, i think. Below are a list of pages that are no longer available. :) — Morder 11:04, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Here's a thought: those discussions are probably public domain. What if we hosted them ourselves, in kind of a wikisource fashion? Then we could just link to them ourselves, and they would be more accessible to everyone. As they are now, those conversations are kind of "lost" in that other than through the links from our site, they are REALLY hard to find. By publicly hosting them ourselves (since we are a well-trafficed trek site) we would be reviving these precious inside info. --- Jaz 05:02, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
Probably, but not necessarily - but even if they are, or at least no one cares enough about it to yell about it - how can we be sure that everything contained in these text files is even accurate? In any case, I've located the webpage that links to these text files (and many more) here: [2]. This at least gives us some insight to where the individual parts are from. I'm going to contact the webpage author and see what he thinks about us copying those files... -- Cid Highwind 11:03, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
My mail to the web page owner:

Greetings :)
I'm a contributor to "Memory Alpha", the Star Trek wiki: http://www.memory-alpha.org. It has been brought to our attention that "Geocities" will be closed by the end of the year. We've then checked our database, and found that several text files with Ron Moore chats are linked from our articles. All of these are listed on your web page here:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6952/posting.htm
There's an ongoing discussion about whether we should save these text files somewhere on Memory Alpha. There hasn't been any final decision about that, yet, but in the meantime, I'd like to ask the following questions:
1. Do you plan on relocating your web page, so that the chats will continue to be available?
2. What is the copyright status of these chats? If they have been openly published on the web before, we believe they could be in the public domain, or otherwise reuseable by us.
3. Where exactly did these chats originate?
4. Have the chats been altered in any way that you know of?
I hope to hear from you, soon. In case you'd like to join the discussion directly, feel free to visit http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Forum:Geocities_going_down - if you want, you can also add your replies to my questions there.
Thanks,Cid

If we decide to "rescue" those files, I think the best way to go on about that would be to copy each individual text file to a subpage of a base page with a description, then employ cascading protection so that these files can't be changed later. For example, the base page could be Ronald D. Moore/AOL chats, the individual archive pages Ronald D. Moore/AOL chats/1 etc. -- Cid Highwind 11:30, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
Follow-up, because this has been referenced elsewhere. :)
There hasn't been a reply to my mail, so I assume that either the webpage owner is not interested in discussing this, or no longer uses the address provided on the page (the latest news there discusses the "40th Anniversary" event of 2006, so...). In any case, since what we're talking about is not some secret intellectual property, but transcripts of public internet chats having been available online for years, I guess it would be save to archive these here, as described above. We should do it for the whole bunch, though, not just for the parts that have been referenced on our pages. -- Cid Highwind 20:33, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Cool. Now that we got the chats, how should we use them? Are we going to simply keep them as archives until the site goes down? Or should we change all our links in articles now to point to the subpages?– Cleanse 23:22, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

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