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 form the internet again. To prevent vandalism, the copied pages would be locked so only Administrators could edit them. This would STILL however require revising all of our reference links.
Any other ideas? - Nick O'Demus 21:12, April 23, 2012 (UTC)