In the modern world, Help:Using WebCite has become a topic of increasing interest to a wide spectrum of people. From experts in the field to those who know little about the subject, Help:Using WebCite has captured everyone's attention. With the rapid evolution of technology and society, Help:Using WebCite has become relevant in various aspects of daily life. In this article, we will explore in depth the complexities and dimensions of Help:Using WebCite, analyzing its impact in different areas and offering a comprehensive overview of this intriguing issue.
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As of July 14, 2019, WebCite does not accept any new archive requests; previously archived pages can still be accessed, but this service cannot be used to make any new archives. |
WebCite is an on-demand web archiving service located at https://www.webcitation.org/. By using WebCite, Wikipedia editors can reduce link rot by preserving a copy of an online source that can be accessed if the original page is moved, changes, or disappears. Not all web pages can be archived, however.
WebCite can archive a range of content, including HTML web pages, PDF files, style sheets, JavaScript, and digital images. Another web archiving service is the Wayback Machine. The two operate differently, and certain pages can be archived by one but not the other. The Wayback Machine takes snapshots of webpages at certain times as well as having an archiving process initiated by user requests; WebCite requires someone to actively archive a link.
There are many ways to submit a web page to WebCite for archiving. If you are new to using WebCite, give the Website form method a go first. The other methods are better suited to those who use WebCite regularly.
This method is easy to use but is slower than the other methods as it requires going to the WebCite website each time you want to archive a web page.
https://www.webcitation.org/archive
.Put simply, a bookmarklet is a web browser bookmark which instead of going to a web page, performs a certain function. With the WebCite bookmarklet, you click the bookmark, it takes the URL of the page you are currently looking at and submits it to WebCite for archiving. This method is easy to set up, easy to use and is fast. To get the most out of this method, it is recommended that you have your Bookmarks/Favorites bar visible or at least have your bookmarks accessible within a click or two. This method only allows you to archive the page you are currently looking at, to archive a different web page you will have to use another method.
https://www.webcitation.org/bookmarklet
.Firefox smart keywords are commonly used to perform searches through the Firefox address bar or to open a bookmark by typing a keyword into the Firefox address bar. Here we are going to use a smart keyword to submit a URL to WebCite for archiving. This method is moderately simple to set up, easy to use and is fast.
WebCite
).https://www.webcitation.org/archive?url=%s&[email protected]
into the Location field, replacing [email protected]
with your email address. An email stating whether the archive process succeeded or failed will be sent to this address. If it was successful, the archive URL will also be included in the email.wc
)wc
" in the above example) followed by a space ("
") in front of the URL of the web page you would like to archive in the Firefox address bar. (e.g. If you are using "wc" as your keyword, the text in the address bar would be wc http://www.example.com/pageyouwantoarchive.html
).Although this is created through Chrome's search engine feature, this functions just like a smart keyword in Firefox. This method is moderately simple to set up, easy to use and is fast.
WebCite
).wc
)https://www.webcitation.org/archive?url=%s&[email protected]
into the third field, replacing [email protected]
with your email address. An email stating whether the archive process succeeded or failed will be sent to this address. If it was successful, the archive URL will also be included in the email.wc
" in the above example) followed by a space ("
") in front of the URL of the web page you would like to archive in the Chrome address bar (e.g. If you are using "wc" as your keyword, the text in the address bar would be wc http://www.example.com/pageyouwantoarchive.html
).WebCite honors the robots exclusion standard, as well as no-cache and no-archive tags and will not archive sites that disallow archiving.
For example, The New York Times has a robots.txt file at https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt which includes:
User-agent: * Disallow: /aponline/ Disallow: /archives/ Disallow: /reuters/
Thus, archive requests for URLs within those folders, and any other similarly listed folder of the New York Times website will be rejected.
Links archived with WebCite should appear in long format (see RfC).
An example long format URL:
https://www.webcitation.org/5eWaHRbn4?url=http://www.example.com/
The 9-digit "Snapshot ID," similar to URL shortening services, contains a base 62 coded timestamp that can be extracted by bots and other programs. It also serves as a unique page ID. This is followed by the original URL which helps protect against malicious code that is hiding an inappropriate link, such as spam.
A second optional long format URL:
https://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.example.com&date=20091104
(date in YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD format)This foregoes the "Snapshot ID" and uses a date argument instead. Either is appropriate for use within Wikipedia.
This archive URL can be inserted into the archive-url=
and its supporting archive-date=
and url-status=
parameters in any of the citation templates. If the original URL is no longer accessible, the url-status
parameter value should be set to dead
. If the original URL is still accessible, the url-status
parameter value should be set to live
.
<ref>{{cite web |last= |first= |title= |work= |publisher= |date= |url= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status= }}</ref>
.
Web pages previously archived through WebCite are accessible through a searchable database. Users may search by URL, date, or by "Snapshot ID".