Citing Websites

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Hitch - in a previous post you referred to a 'raw link', in this post you use the term 'naked link' - I think for the same thing, but maybe not.

BR

Same thing, or at least, I mean them to be the same thing. If I'm using either term wrongly, hopefully, someone here will tell me. ;-)

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

I understood Naked/Raw Link to mean the same exact thing.

[PeterT]

How do you handle dead Links, or cited pages that undergo massive content changes

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by PeterT

How do you handle dead Links, or cited pages that undergo massive content changes

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Peter--are you asking me, or someone else? I, obviously, don't, as we just produce them.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by PeterT

How do you handle dead Links, or cited pages that undergo massive content changes

If you are writing something formal, just use whatever Style Guide you follow (Chicago, MLA, [...]).

In Non-Fiction, this is partially why citations tend to be verbose with title + author + publisher + original link + publication date + access date + DOI + [...].

They typically try to give you enough information so in the future, a reader could try to piece things together and/or find a duplicate source.

For example, let's say there was a book from the late-90s which cited an article on the New York Times website. The original link was long dead (the redirects probably worked over a few redesigns, but not after a spaghetti nest of 20+ years)... but since I had the article title and author, I could just pop into a search engine and type "title author site:nytimes.com".

Original Links + Access Dates are important, because you may be able to use something like Archive.org to see the site on that exact date (or near enough). As an example, Archive.org has been scraping all the top news websites hourly for years and years, it would be tough for an article to slip through the cracks.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by PeterT

How do you handle dead Links, or cited pages that undergo massive content changes

Well, you obviously can't cite a dead link. What you do is cite the live link that you have utilized in your research, followed by (seen 20 Oct 2017) or some such thing. It is not the researcher's responsibility to keep a website the same over time.

An analogous problem for the researcher is posed by ebooks. We were taught to cite a book by author, title, publisher (and weirdly, sometimes city), year of publication, and page number. But increasingly there are no page numbers. Locations IMHO are useless. So the rather unsatisfactory solution has been to cite the chapter title. Wouldn't work for À la recherche du temps perdu, but good enough for government work in most cases.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Well, you obviously can't cite a dead link. What you do is cite the live link that you have utilized in your research, followed by (seen 20 Oct 2017) or some such thing. It is not the researcher's responsibility to keep a website the same over time.

An analogous problem for the researcher is posed by ebooks. We were taught to cite a book by author, title, publisher (and weirdly, sometimes city), year of publication, and page number. But increasingly there are no page numbers. Locations IMHO are useless. So the rather unsatisfactory solution has been to cite the chapter title. Wouldn't work for À la recherche du temps perdu, but good enough for government work in most cases.

Honestly, NJ, I kind of disagree that Location #'s are worthless. Why do you say that? At least they're consistent, unlike "page numbers" as created by ePUB devices, each to their own calculation.

Hitch

[AlexBell]

Thanks to you both.

[Tex2002ans]

I recently came across this article referenced by The Digital Reader, "When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks" written by an editor from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The entire article was a great read, but here is the part on Hyperlinks in backlist books + Link Rot:

Hyperlinks

Many of our books have URLs in them. Particularly our adult nonfiction books, which often have endnotes with lots of URLs. And in ebooks, we make these URLs into hyperlinks.

And as we know, URLs can stop working.

The web community has gotten good about talking about this problem, and they call it link rot.

There’s scholarly research on the prevalence of link rot—when URLs stop working—and of reference rot—when the information at a given URL changes from what it was when the author cited it. This study found that more than half of the URLs cited in US Supreme Court decisions suffered from one or the other. Which is not a great thing for the history of American jurisprudence.

Other studies have looked at the half-life of a URL, suggesting that it might be about two years. (The concept of half-life here is just like that for radioactivity, the amount of time it takes for half of something to decay, or in this case, for half of the URLs in a set to stop working.)

What does this look like in an ebook? Powers of Two is a pretty typical nonfiction book from our backlist. It has 275 URLs in it, mostly in the endnotes. It was published in August 2014.

So if we use that half-life of two years model, this summer, in August 2016, we would expect that only 50% of those URLs would still be good.

By August 2018, only 25% of the URLs would still be good.

By August 2024, ten years after pub, this model would predict that only about 3% of the URLs would still be working. And unfortunately, I don’t plan to be retired yet by then. So this is a real problem for us.

When I actually tested the URLs in Powers of Two with the W3C Link Checker, I discovered that about 47 (or 17%) of the URLs were not working.

On the bright side, 83% percent were still working. So we’re running a bit ahead of the curve there. (Or perhaps the websites our authors choose to cite are more reliable than the average website.)

As usual, there’s a “do it right from the beginning” solution, which certain parts of the web and scholarly communities are embracing (using things like DOI to identify electronic documents or a service like Perma.cc that archives cited online content). I haven’t seen trade publishing take this problem on.

But because we’re talking about backlist, and we don’t have the advantage of going back in time to do ask our authors to archive their links correctly, we’re talking about inheriting tens of thousands of old URLs that were not deliberately preserved in any way. (Not all our books have 275 URLs, and some have none, so what if we say 20 on average? Hypothetical 5000 book backlist at 20 URLs per book = 100,000 slowly decaying URLs.)

And this is a problem for print books as well as for the ebooks of course, but I think we’re more content to let the URLs in print books function essentially as decoration—as signs that there is scholarship underlying their claims. And we also assume that a very motivated reader who types out an entire URL from a print book to try to get to a source document will also have some basic web literacy around using Google to search for an alternative.

The URLs in ebooks, however, we transform into hyperlinks, which imply that the information is just a click away, and when it isn’t, it doesn’t just seem like the link is broken. It seems like your ebook is broken.

The hyperlinks in ebooks can also be checked in automated fashion, and then we get this:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/...TG45dAIy0g.png

So this is the scale at which we’re dealing with this problem right now—our backlist has a hundred thousand slowly decaying URLs, little time bombs embedded in our backlist—and the retailer response is to send me an individual email every time they notice one. Fortunately, they don’t seem to be looking very hard right now.

And then, the interesting part: what do we do to fix this? There are a few options, but they all have some authorial implications:

• If the site’s just been reorganized, find the new correct URL.
• If the URL is just meant to point to general further information, find a new site that contains that information.
• Remove the URL altogether. We’ll do this if a citation given is complete enough that the reader can probably find the print version of the material cited, even though the online version seems to be gone.
• Leave the URL, but remove the hyperlink. This looks like a mistake in the ebook to me, but sometimes you just don’t have any good options. This seems to satisfy retailer complaints (or at least evade their automated link checking).

Originally Posted by Hitch

Honestly, NJ, I kind of disagree that Location #'s are worthless. Why do you say that? At least they're consistent, unlike "page numbers" as created by ePUB devices, each to their own calculation.

*Casually cites one of my ginormous posts in the "Sick of Amazon Kindle books with Page Numbers" thread, which categorized the Pros/Cons of all the different location methods*

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I recently came across this article referenced by The Digital Reader, "When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks" written by an editor from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The entire article was a great read, but here is the part on Hyperlinks in backlist books + Link Rot:

THAT is a brilliant read. Thanks for that!

*Casually cites one of my ginormous posts in the "Sick of Amazon Kindle books with Page Numbers" thread, which categorized the Pros/Cons of all the different location methods*

Yes, yes, don't be a brat. I've been bloody sick for days, and when I cogitated--as much as my foggy brain is able--on trying to find that, my ennui won out over my scholarship. ;-)

Hitch

[DaleDe]

yes, I run into the same problem in our wiki. My solution is to use Archive.org to provide a link. I am not actively trying to fix all the pages but if a link is really important I go to archive and find it.

I have also been known to duplicate a page for reference when needed or make a download available.

Dale

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

yes, I run into the same problem in our wiki. My solution is to use Archive.org to provide a link. I am not actively trying to fix all the pages but if a link is really important I go to archive and find it.

Same thing occurs at Wikipedia, they have a whole page dedicated towards explaining different methods to mitigate Link Rot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot

I remember when I was cleaning up + updating a lot of citations, I ran into this problem. Lots and lots of dead links in citations.

A lot of videos are also referenced, and get pulled down for copyright reasons, locked behind region restrictions, or just get deleted over time (user account taken down, user took the video down, made it private, etc. etc.). These need to be seriously archived as well, especially since Youtube gives you absolutely no indication what the Title + User of the taken down video was.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Honestly, NJ, I kind of disagree that Location #'s are worthless. Why do you say that? At least they're consistent, unlike "page numbers" as created by ePUB devices, each to their own calculation.

Hitch

Do epubs even have locations? I read a lot of epubs, and I've never seen one.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Do epubs even have locations? I read a lot of epubs, and I've never seen one.

No, NJ, they have faux pages, typically, but not always. Locations, in fact, are far (far) more consistent than pages, because generally, they're always the same, across the entire Kindleverse.

Hitch

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Hitch

No, NJ, they have faux pages, typically, but not always. Locations, in fact, are far (far) more consistent than pages, because generally, they're always the same, across the entire Kindleverse.

Hitch

There is a standard for page numbers in ePub 3 that can be very consistent and even match the hardcopy book.