So for years I've complained about a serious issue on the Internet, the highest visibility of the problem can be seen within Wikipedia.
There is a black-hole of citable/source material from 1994-1996 now long missing from the WWW. The key issue is the Internet Archive didn't start functioning until 1996 and wasn't in full steam until 1998 so many of the early sites that launched in 1994 that reached their 3 year natural life span where long gone before the Archive crawler even had a chance to touch them.
How this plays out is that historical websites that were highly relevant or culturally significant which were only referenced by other early 90's websites and limited printed URL catalogs (magazines, etc...) are routinely purged from Wikipedia for lack of sources showing their relevance.
How would one go about trying to recapture this lost window into the landscape of the early web?
There is a black-hole of citable/source material from 1994-1996 now long missing from the WWW. The key issue is the Internet Archive didn't start functioning until 1996 and wasn't in full steam until 1998 so many of the early sites that launched in 1994 that reached their 3 year natural life span where long gone before the Archive crawler even had a chance to touch them.
How this plays out is that historical websites that were highly relevant or culturally significant which were only referenced by other early 90's websites and limited printed URL catalogs (magazines, etc...) are routinely purged from Wikipedia for lack of sources showing their relevance.
How would one go about trying to recapture this lost window into the landscape of the early web?