Ask HN: How to establish 94/96 web relevance?

6 points by bcRIPster 13y ago ↗ HN

So for years I've complained about a serious issue on the Internet, the highest visibility of the problem can be seen within Wikipedia.

There is a black-hole of citable/source material from 1994-1996 now long missing from the WWW. The key issue is the Internet Archive didn't start functioning until 1996 and wasn't in full steam until 1998 so many of the early sites that launched in 1994 that reached their 3 year natural life span where long gone before the Archive crawler even had a chance to touch them.

How this plays out is that historical websites that were highly relevant or culturally significant which were only referenced by other early 90's websites and limited printed URL catalogs (magazines, etc...) are routinely purged from Wikipedia for lack of sources showing their relevance.

How would one go about trying to recapture this lost window into the landscape of the early web?

3 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 19.7 ms ] thread

glitch273 13y ago ↗

Start a site documenting them and don't rely on Wikipedia.

bcRIPster 13y ago ↗

Documenting what though? The sites are gone. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any pre-internet Archive efforts to capture large portions of the known web at the time? Finding something like that would probably the best bet I would guess.

Like guys who retained all of the early Usenet traffic, or mirrored old FTP/Gopher sites.

And while it's all fine and well to not depend on Wikipedia... when the majority of people treat it like the word of god when it comes to "facts", it's important to work to help make it as accurate as possible.