Wikipedia entries are disappearing

Ok so this is a bit strange, but lately I have been trying to look back into some research I did back in 2005-2006. (This part doesn't have to do with the wiki entries disappearing but hear me out)

What I was looking for was some technical data, which I hardly understand anyways. Because back then I was doing research on a NASA research facility located at DIA and I landed upon an index of daily notes and events that were taking place, and it was all technical data, though in English it was like a different language almost because the verbage used was done so in a way that most common people like myself wasn't a language that I would understand. Anyways, at the time, there was a flood I think that wiped out like 500,000 homes in Africa and that was the information that I was looking for. So what I got from this experience though I could be completely wrong, is that there are a network of tunnels underground that link around the world, this gets into haarp and stuff like that. If I understood it correctly, they can send blasts of energy to a certain location underground and at the time they were testing it so they were documenting their results accordingly. Its a bit hard to explain. Anyways I cant find the original source of this info, that was like a daily log so it got me curious.

So I started clicking through some of my bookmarks that I had saved from 2005-06 and most of them are still there.

However I clicked on a link that was a wikipedia entry about mystery babylon and this was removed and it got me thinking. I recently tried to find a wiki entry about merit selection and when I went to retrieve it it was also removed.This was about a month ago. But if I remember correctly the merit selection entry was still there at least a year ago.

You can direct all inquiries to the Ministry of Truth...they will set you straight about what you saw or didn't see...

A99

reply to post by thehoneycomb
Wiki editors can do a lot of things but transparency is also required. This means that whatever you put on there will remain on there in the back-end of the history pages.

If you know the rough dates of your entries, you should be able to find them. If you were/are a wiki member, you can search the history of your username. If you have never been a member, you can find one of your edits and search by IP address.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Thats helpful, but I dont think any of those option are available to me.

You might try this:

Way Back Machine

It's simply a search engine of internet archives and captures of pages and sites back as they existed in times past. I've even found a couple of my own websites for many many years ago. Good for a laugh on that, but you may find what you need that way. Dejavu used to be another one like it, but looking at it now it doesn't seem to be that anymore.

There are a couple others like Way Back, but I can't recall the names off hand. Personally, I have 3 extensions in Chrome and Firefox dedicated to nothing but screenshot to image and PDF files as well as my trusty old 'XPS Writer' option for any Print command....which sends it nicely to a file on my hard drive. There, I have gigs and gigs of captures webpages and full sites going back a few years now.

I'll say this on vanishing things. There is a subject that is VERY..explosively...controversial, which is why I'm not explaining it. Instant Fight at ATS..lol..but I'll say it's a perfectly valid research topic and WAS easy to find plenty about in the late 90's. I went looking to prove a point to my other half a few years back and EVERYTHING...absolutely EVERYTHING on this specific topic was gone. Poof. As if the whole topic never existed.

Had I not had books on my shelf of a Law Enforcement nature with transcripts and actual audio recordings OF the topic...I might have doubted my OWN memories. Since then, I cap, PDF or just print to file EVERYTHING of anything real interesting I may want or need to reference later.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Thanks wrabbit, Ill give that a try. Though I am not curious about what the wiki entries actually said. I am more curious why they are being removed.

Originally posted by akushla99

Never seen that before, odd that the servers cant handle it. However, the disrupting the flow of discussion thing, really?

Anyways, I too have tried to go to something on wiki that I bookmarked and it was removed as well. However when I looked up the topic again, I found it. Could it be that the URL has changed because the title changed, or they re-arranged their servers or something?

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Wow, thats really cool, thank you.

That deserves a star.

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
You might try this:

Way Back Machine

It's simply a search engine of internet archives and captures of pages and sites back as they existed in times past. I've even found a couple of my own websites for many many years ago. Good for a laugh on that, but you may find what you need that way. Dejavu used to be another one like it, but looking at it now it doesn't seem to be that anymore.

There are a couple others like Way Back, but I can't recall the names off hand. Personally, I have 3 extensions in Chrome and Firefox dedicated to nothing but screenshot to image and PDF files as well as my trusty old 'XPS Writer' option for any Print command....which sends it nicely to a file on my hard drive. There, I have gigs and gigs of captures webpages and full sites going back a few years now.

I'll say this on vanishing things. There is a subject that is VERY..explosively...controversial, which is why I'm not explaining it. Instant Fight at ATS..lol..but I'll say it's a perfectly valid research topic and WAS easy to find plenty about in the late 90's. I went looking to prove a point to my other half a few years back and EVERYTHING...absolutely EVERYTHING on this specific topic was gone. Poof. As if the whole topic never existed.

Had I not had books on my shelf of a Law Enforcement nature with transcripts and actual audio recordings OF the topic...I might have doubted my OWN memories. Since then, I cap, PDF or just print to file EVERYTHING of anything real interesting I may want or need to reference later.

edit on 29-10-2012 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

Awww. Got me all curious as to what the topic is now

And yeah OP. Wayback machine may not work for everything you are looking for, but it will definitely help out with at least a few articles, maybe nothing is there though. Wiki is huge resource website though, so I'm sure a capture is available

reply to post by thehoneycomb


I agree with OP, if stuff is being removed, or being made difficult to find, then its worrying.
Everyone who has bookmarked wiki entries ought to go check to see if they still exist, if they dont then report back to this thread.

I seem to remember that wikipedia had a purge of some data a while back as i can remember looking up someone and there was a wiki entry saying it was going to be removed by a certain date and to backup anything you want before it happens

reply to post by thehoneycomb


Can you share the links you bookmarked?

Cheers!

Originally posted by thehoneycomb
reply to post by Kandinsky

 

Thats helpful, but I dont think any of those option are available to me.

But you can still search the edit history of wiki.

en.wikipedia.org...age_history

ugh... google wiki page history... ATS needs a new tag. a [ noemote ] tag to stop parts of urls turning into red herrings..

Originally posted by VoidHawk
reply to post by thehoneycomb

 

I agree with OP, if stuff is being removed, or being made difficult to find, then its worrying.
Everyone who has bookmarked wiki entries ought to go check to see if they still exist, if they dont then report back to this thread.

edit on 29-10-2012 by VoidHawk because: (no reason given)

Because wiki owes the internet an explanation.. I pay good money to have wikipedia at my fingertips and untouched by the nefarious clutches of the men in blackhats.

Oh wait..

Scrap that then lol

reply to post by thehoneycomb

Thats helpful, but I dont think any of those option are available to me.

Why aren't they? By exploring the history of edits on any wiki page, you can find any changes and who made them.

As an example, here are the earliest edits for the Battle of the Somme that go back to 2001. Or here are the edits from the Wu Tang Wiki that also go back to 2001.

The IPs are for people who weren't members. The names are members and editors. Even offensive wiki edits and pages are accessible in revision histories and/or talk and contributions.

Underground tunnels that link up around the world would be highly speculative and difficult to source in any meaningful way. Such a page could conceivably have been an orphan or stub and been removed.

Now, if you're saying your pages have been removed completely without trace, it'd be useful if you post the links in your bookmarks.

in addition to wayback, if the page has been removed recently it may also be stuck in google cache. Tho not evey site allows archive.

More often than not - particularly when its an important search the pages will have been blocked from being archived in the WayBack machine - as in --->

reply to post by Vitruvian


Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that it was blocked, just that the page is not in the archives. There are way more things not in the archive compared to those that are. Or, at least it seemed that way when I just went to use it.

Originally posted by Renegade2283
reply to post by Vitruvian

 

Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that it was blocked, just that the page is not in the archives. There are way more things not in the archive compared to those that are. Or, at least it seemed that way when I just went to use it.

I am aware of what you are talking about and that's not what I was referring to. The image that I put up in the post was merely an example of what the "generic" response from Way-back looks like when material from a particular site was NOT archived. I was making the point that many webmasters and owners of websites do NOT participate, and as such have made use of their option to OPT-OUT of any archiving of their material and I have found in my more extensive research efforts in this regard that many of the important sites do just that - they opt out, in point of fact, they block their material from appearing on the Way-back machine.


The Wayback Machine and the DMCA
by Lee Gesmer on July 14, 2005
Copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

If you own a web site and for some reason you don’t want to be archived by the Wayback Machine, you can opt out. The Wayback Machine permits website administrators to use the voluntary SRE (Standard for Robot Exclusion) to identify files or directories that cannot be “crawled” and indexed. Exclusion is accomplished by inserting a file called robots.txt on a web server. According to Internet.org this not only prospectively excludes a site from being crawled, but will “exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine.”

For example this is the typical NON-TRANSPARENCY response from the Government owned (meaning we own it) H.A.A.R.P. website:


A decent response from say - Microsoft Corp - would looks like this: