Help:Using WebCite: Difference between revisions

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Latest revision as of 20:01, 1 August 2025

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{{ambox|type=content|text='''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 intermittently available [[web archiving]] service located at [https://www.webcitation.org/ https://www.web-citationwebcitation.org/]. The archive no longer accepts new snapshots, and usage on English Wikipedia has been deprecated ([[Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_159#RfC:_Deprecate_webcitation.org_aka_WebCite|RfC]]) ie. without good reason you should not add new archives into Enwiki, and you should try to move existing snapshots to other archive providers, or refactor the citation to a different live link. WebCite's future is uncertain, and its reliability is poor. For example it was offline for 1 year and 8 months during the period 2021-2023. Outages are tracked on the talk page of [[WebCite]].

==Long-form URLs==

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* It is not possible to save WebCite URLs at archive.org - it may appear to save correctly, but is an unreliable method. For why see [[Talk:WebCite#general_problem|this discussion]].

* Be aware of "content drift". When a web page has content that changes over time, such as stock prices or weather updates, this is called "drift". When the original WebCite snapshot was created it contains the intended information eg. current status of a typhoon at a certain day and hour. However, this page may change quickly, anyand any future snapshot of that same page will have different information. Thus when finding snapshots at other archive providers, be aware of content drift for certain types of pages.

==See also==

===Docs===

* [[Wikipedia:Link rot]], how-to guide for prevention of link rot

* [[WikipediaHelp:UsingArchiving thea Wayback Machine|Using the Wayback Machinesource]], how-to guide

** [[WikipediaHelp:Using Archive.is|Usingthe Archive.todayWayback Machine]], how-to guide

** [[Help:Using archive.today]]
** [[Talk:Perma.cc#Perma.cc_and_Wikipedia|Using Perma.cc]]

===Tools===

* {{tl|User WebCite}}, userbox

* [[User:UBX/WebCite]], alternative userbox

* [[User:UBX/WebCite2]], "I donated" userbox

==Notes==