User talk:Acagastya/startArchiving.js

Caveats

A couple of thoughts, here.

• We shouldn't archive at least until the article has been published. Some years ago we had someone who advocated archiving sources at the time they were read and then reviewing from the archived copies, which would mean that if a news source discovered they'd made a mistake and changed the article we would never know about it. We concluded we need to work from the current version of sources, and the frustration of sources changed out from under us is the better alternative. Iirc we were initially interested by the pre-review-archive proposal, and then got suspicious about it because the user who'd advocated it turned out to be... well, I think that was the user who got banned from the project by full vote of the community, the only user banned in that way in the decade I've been on the project and the nastiest piece of work I've ever encountered on-wiki (including blocked vandals; btw, last I knew that user was still a Wikipedian-in-good-standing, which I took as a commentary on the failure of Wikipedia's superficial social standards). We agreed, therefore, that {{source/archived}} should not display the archived link unless the page is fully protected, thus presumably not until the article was published and placed in our protected archives.
• I don't request an archive of an article unless I'm convinced there isn't already an archive of it; requesting multiple archives of a static news article strikes me as an unnecessary burden on the resources of the archive. Perhaps my resource-consciousness comes from the early decades of microcomputing.

--Pi zero (talk) 13:52, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@Pi zero: re the second point, yes you had mentioned that before. I used to archive sources right after the article was published. But never liked the process of multiple clicks. The way I intend to use it is: after the article is published, click on it, it would archive the sources. Don't re-archive it again, because it is supposed to be a snapshot in time. If the source link goes extinct in future, one could use the archived source just in case if they had to check something.
•–• 14:10, 3 February 2020 (UTC)