What’s the Problem?

Before we enumerate use cases, we can state some initial indications of a problem.

Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, dead links are a problem for Internet users everywhere.

This isn’t a new problem (W3C – Cool URIs don’t change).

49% of links in Supreme court opinions are dead
NYT – In Supreme Court Opinions, Web Links to Nowhere

136,312 Wikipedia articles contain dead external links
Wikipedia – Category:All articles with dead external links

Some initiatives, such as the Internet Archive, Perma.cc, and Memento, are attempting to snapshot and preserve the Internet and provide seamless access to those snapshots.

But more and more, just a handful of centralized entities host information online. Online centralization creates “choke points” that can restrict access to web content.

This Community Group intends to pursue complementary solutions to missing online content from various angles:

• date stamped archiving of web content
• enabling content management systems and content authors to embed knowledge of archives and citation dates into links
• providing browsing users with ways to discover this information

The more routes we provide to information, the more all people can freely share that information, even in the face of filtering or blockages.