Forum:References issue - please read

Forums: Index > The Wizengamot > References issue - please read

I've recently noticed an issue with a couple of our most commonly used references.

The website www.accio-quote.org, an archive of many of Rowling's press releases and interviews, seems to be down, and as it hadn't been updated since 2008 anyway, I'm not sure if it's coming back.

J.K. Rowling's own website, www.jkrowling.com, has recently undergone a major revision, and a lot of the background information on the Harry Potter series seems to be gone (i.e. - Dean Thomas' background in the "Extra Stuff" section). While some of that same info is now available on Pottermore, it's still only on Book 1, and it'll be a while before the rest becomes available again.

We've used both sites rather heavily as references in many of our articles, so this creates something of a problem for us. There a couple of possible solutions, but they'll still require a lot of work.

There's a site called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that can search for previous revisions of websites, and many of the referenced pages from Accio-Quote and Rowling's site can still be found there. This would still require looking through many articles and revising the web addresses of each reference.

For example, www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/extrastuff_view.cfm?id=2 can still be seen at web.archive.org/web/20110623035046/http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/extrastuff_view.cfm?id=2

Another option would be to use the Web Archive to create our own archive here on the site, copying the text from the original sources to pages here. While this would be a bit more work, we wouldn't have to worry about our references disappearing from the internet again. To prevent vandalism, the copied pages would be locked so only Administrators could edit them. This would STILL however require revising many of our reference links.

Any other ideas? - Nick O'Demus 21:12, April 23, 2012 (UTC)

Can't think of any, but I imagine at some point this will be an issue with Pottermore as well, maybe not in the immediate future, but having something set up, so that we don't have to go through this again now, would be helpful in more than just taking care of the current situation, but avoiding it ever happening again.

 BachLynn23  Send me an Owl!  The worst failure, is the failure to try.  23:19,4/23/2012 

I agree, as well. Future unpleasantness will be avoided this way, without compromising the verifiability of our sources. Perhaps a new Forum namespace, called something among the lines of "The Daily Prophet", "Prophecy Record", "Ministry of Magic Archives", or "Hogwarts Archives"? (by the way, all of them are canon terms). We should create a template as well (like the image documentation one) listing original source, link (if available), etc., for easy and transparent reference (as our articles cannot, by definition, be our sources). --  Seth Cooper  owl post! 00:10, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

Rowling's site is rather simply laid out, so perhaps even subpages of the main article would work. Perhaps something like this? A link to the original, archived page is included as verification of the source.

Accio-Quote would be a bit more problematic since there are so many rather lengthy transcripts. Seth's idea of a new namespace on the wiki is probably the most workable solution, both for this and the "No HPW articles as references" rule. - Nick O'Demus 00:42, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

I think each transcript should have its own page, to make referencing that piece of information in articles easier (i.e., to reference Dean Thomas's biography, one would simply direct the reader to [["Dean Thomas's background (Chamber of Secrets)"]] instead of [[Information from J.K. Rowling's Official Site#"Dean Thomas's background (Chamber of Secrets)"]]. --  Seth Cooper  owl post! 22:29, April 24, 2012 (UTC)

Some of these interviews are massive. Would we be copying the entire things, or just the information that we need for our sources? (I'm assumming the latter.) ProfessorTofty 01:09, April 27, 2012 (UTC)

I was actually thinking the former, always with proper attribution saying where the original text was from. I don't think size would be an issue. --  Seth Cooper  owl post! 23:24, April 27, 2012 (UTC)

AccioQuote, at least, is back up again, so we can probably hold off on that part (for now). We still need to address the issue of J.K. Rowling's old site though. If we do create our own reference archive, it might be worthwhile to do one for the new info from Pottermore also, since not everyone has an account there. - Nick O'Demus 11:42, May 16, 2012 (UTC)