Hello all, bringing up a section of the Layout Guide for review following a discussion on Discord:
Official websites, social media profiles, and databases are considered a convenience, and as such, do not require the inclusion of an archival link, and should be delisted if no longer available. This does not apply to official websites associated with Lucasfilm and Star Wars products, nor to websites providing insights into an individual's creative process, such as personal blogs of Star Wars creators. If an official website responding to one of those criteria goes offline, then an archival link should be provided in the following format:
[url Official website] {{C|content now obsolete; [archiveurl backup link]}}
Currently, this does present some inconsistencies on pages. An example I'm easily able to find is Jesse Lonergan, and some points that came up were:
- Half of the links in External links have backup links and half don't, which can look awkward (see Amazon and below as those templates force-require an archivedate, as opposed to the top ones).
- It's oddly inconsistent with Wookieepedia's modern-era archive first and ask questions later mindset, since we have lost some valuable content from social media profiles as people have fled various platforms, notably Twitter, that may have been in their bios previously.
- For I'm fairly sure years at this point, we have been including backup links to author websites even against policy on almost any status article that we've passed, in the above format, even if still live. The format very often used is also present on Jesse Lonergan as has been precedent.
Some points I'd wanted to bring up is that perhaps we should start archiving these pages; archival doesn't take much effort, and it'd certainly be consistent with the rest of the site. At the very least, official site urls, I've been told, would be much better off using {{OfficialSite}} rather than plainlinking [url Official website] or using WebCite. The reasons for that are that it isn't a citation and thus needn't the same many parameters, and also so C4-DE can recognize official sites and properly place them sitewide. Since we so often use the same official site formatting now, it should be able to swap it all over to that as well.
So as a summary, I'd like to propose at the very least that we codify that any official creators' website can be archived and change the formatting to use the new template (this would also apply to the obsolete format point at the bottom). But secondly, I'd also like to hear if we should consider archiving all social media handles for consistency, since atm it's still the half-and-half issue that would remain even if we sorted the first point. And thirdly, I'm unsure if requiring the delisting of dead social media accounts is entirely necessary in every case; of course, there's some cases where an author is choosing to scrub it and we can respect that, but we have a decent number of dead Comixology profiles and such that aren't really that bad to list IMO since we have them and why not?—spookywillowwtalk 01:41, 3 October 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
- Absolutely, it seems kinda absurd that policy is recommending the use of plainlinks, the template + mandatory archiving should definitely be adopted for websites. As for the other points, I see no reason not to archive all social media handles for posterity's sake, and I think that delisting dead accounts is certainly a good option to have if the person wants that, but likewise there are cases when it's obviously beneficial to keep them, so any policy should definitely give us flexibility for that. Tommy-Macaroni (he/they) 09:25, 3 October 2024 (UTC)
- Yeah, this part of the policy was really me doing some cognitive gymnastics to try to concile the traditional way of doing external links and our new ways (and archival needs). In retrospect, it fell kinda like two steps forward, one step backward. I'm all for this new OfficialSite template and moving to a "all archived" doctrine of external links, for the sake of future needs and consistencies. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 17:20, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
- Well, I spoke too quickly: we should not have an archive for databases (Wikipedia, Imdb, etc). NanoLuukeCloning Facility 13:47, 18 October 2024 (UTC)