Forum:Geocities going down

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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

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)

The next step is to change our links to point to the new locations. — Morder (talk) 23:31, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. If we archive stuff, we should use it. One thing though - this is pretty much a special case, because we'd be using something as a resource that is under our own control, and won't be verifiable some months from now. I don't doubt that Morder really just uploaded the unchanged documents, but what if someone, months or years from now, questions that (Call me paranoid, but crazier things have happened)?

To avoid that, should independent contributors start double-checking individual pages, and indicate on the talk page that our content is indeed an exact copy? -- Cid Highwind 11:02, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I've made a template here - Template:AOLchat. What do you guys think? – Cleanse 07:28, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Looks good. It fits well with existing citation formats. — Morder (talk) 07:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. As an example, I've done up Ronald D. Moore#Background. I'll wait a bit to see if there any objections before going on a template spree ;-).– Cleanse 07:45, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

The one small objection I have is that the Ron Moore subpages currently include chats done by other persons - for example Ronald D. Moore/AOL chats/braga1.txt. Those are obviously misplaced at the moment, and should be located elsewhere while still being accessible via this template somehow. (Suggestions?) Other than that, nice template! -- Cid Highwind 09:38, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

The easiest way I see is to move all the Non-Moore pages to "Whoever/AOL chats/file". So we'd have Michael Piller/AOL chats/pillrcht.txt etc. (Ronald D. Moore/AOL chats/altgen.txt isn't actually a chat log so I dunno where we'd put that) Then add a variable to the template for person.– Cleanse 10:17, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

There we go. That should work.– Cleanse 10:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Page to be saved

Does anyone know of a good way to back up or mirror this geopage: http://ca.geocities.com/ryan_greenson/ ? it's a pretty decent walktrough of a Star Trek game but I'm not sure how to duplicate/save it without manually copying down each page's code. -- Captain MKB 02:22, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Aside from it not really belonging on this wiki there's a walkthrough wiki somewhere on wikia but I guess it could go in a user subpage of yours. :) — Morder (talk) 02:24, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

OK. I was more wondering about some trick downloading all the html and whatever other files went into it as some kind of archive or file that could be used as a source for the game article here, not to be posted or maintained here. My html stuff is rusty. -- Captain MKB 02:32, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, misunderstood. Best bet, if it's one page, would be to just use the "Save Page as" option in your browser. — Morder (talk) 03:07, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Frames. I'll have to look up all source pages individually. Yuck. -- Captain MKB 03:09, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Move subpages

It's been brought to my attention by bp0 that the subpages violate our current policy on subpages. I'm all for a move but have no idea where a good place would be to put them right now. A Memory Alpha:Sources might be one way to go. This is a rather unique situation since the sources had to be archived here due to the original source going offline. They also exist on trekweb and we could just link there but if that source goes offline, as well, we'd have to archive them here again anyway. So I'd like to get some input before I do anything as I'd have to move them and move them again if it's changed. — Morder (talk) 10:38, January 6, 2010 (UTC)

Well... the implicit reasoning of that guideline page obviously is to discourage any sort of classification structure where we want useful names - not an outright ban of any subpage "just because we say so".

Actually, I tend to just removing those pages, now that they found a "safe spot" somewhere else. Saves us the hassle of having to argue which sources we want to keep, and how we handle them (editing allowed or not?) and why we do that at all (we still try to be an encyclopedia with independent sources, right?) - and last but not least, where we keep them. Of course, their new home could eventually go offline too, but the same could be said about any web resource we use to base article content on. Those chats aren't that special in the grand scheme of things - they just happened to be the one thing we used that was located on geocities. -- Cid Highwind 10:50, January 6, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I understand the reasoning as for why we shouldn't have subpages. I'm also not too sure we want to delete the sources simply because they can be hosted anywhere and it's simpler to host them here. Especially since they're chat archives as opposed to a blog like Eavesdropping. If the sources are in their original packaging and locked from future edits, I don't see a problem with it. That said, we could easily update the {{AOLchat}} template to point to trek web, as long as they use a similar structure for the chat locations. — Morder (talk) 10:54, January 6, 2010 (UTC)

I'm for keeping them, for the reasons stated above, and simply because we already when through the trouble to get them. Of course, Cid is right, in that they aren't all that important; but if we did ever lose them, everything that is currently cited with them could, at some later date, be removed since it couldn't be cited per MA policy.

So, a source page sounds good to me. - Archduk3:talk 11:15, January 6, 2010 (UTC)

If we keep them, I think we should first take our time to discuss what other sources we'd archive ourselves (and what sources we wouldn't), and especially, how we deal with them. For example, there have been minor "formatting" edits to the archived chats already, and a "missing one" seems to have been added after the fact. -- Cid Highwind 11:16, January 6, 2010 (UTC)

Pages with geocities links

See Special:LinkSearch for full list

Sites

http://geocities.com/imokproductions/NanciResume

404

Pages

Text files

Ron Moore

Images

404

404 Pages

Hurry up!

If anyone still wants to save some Geocities content, now would be the time. As [XKCD http://xkcd.com/] claims (in big, ugly, flashing, ComicSans letters, no less), Geocities is going down today. :) -- Cid Highwind 16:03, October 26, 2009 (UTC)