Wikinews:Water cooler/policy/archives/2016/December

Interactive maps and the archive

Interactive maps are now a thing. My initial thoughts were we can't use them because they'll be subject to updates and redesigns in breach of archive policy. (Maps are images, images are content, historic content is stable.) But I'm now not so sure.

Is a change to the format of the image content? Formatting changes (and even grammar etc) are long held to be fair game under archive policy. If the map changes colours, the way you interact, that kind of thing, has it changed in content? I'm starting to think it perhaps hasn't.

@Koavf: I'd be interested to hear your thoughts since you're I think the first to experiment with such a map on Wikinews. And @Pi zero: iirc you were around through much of the more recent discussions on how archive is applied, such as {{missing image}}. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 15:50, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

@Blood Red Sandman: For what it's worth, I think OpenStreetMap (and consequently, our projects which employ it) should have an option for time-stamping so that we have "slices" of a map from a given point in time. E.g. the entire purpose of me inserting a map was to point to a structure which doesn't exist as of tomorrow morning. I have to admit that since I'm less active on this project, I can't speak intelligently about policy but I understand what you're saying: since there is some dynamic content, it can't be archived as such. One way to look at it is to just shrug and say, "The article itself is archived, even if some of the media accompanying it is subject to change. That's also true of images on c: (one of which, has in fact changed since I posted my story here). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:19, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

By the spirit of the archive policy (which is what matters), a photo is one sort of thing, details are usually significant, but if an image is just the form that some information happens to take, then the underlying information is mostly what matters. I could see something like a change of color scheme being admissible under the archive policy. I don't know enough about interactive maps technically, atm, to speak intelligently to what this means for them. (Clearly I'm going to have to learn more, in my copious free time.) --Pi zero (talk) 16:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)