Internet Archive

Internet Archive (IA) is a nonprofit media organization based in the United States and serving the global online community. This Meta-Wiki documentation lists Wikimedia projects which people from IA archive support, and which are about the IA which Wikimedia community members have done, and which anyone has done with online IA resources. The Wikimedia community maintains this documentation and anyone can edit it. This documentation is not a communication channel to the IA, but rather, a place for the Wikimedia community to record its own interactions.

Projects

InternetArchiveBot

InternetArchiveBot is a tool which seeks to connect links to the sources which Wikipedia cites to archival copies of those sources in the Wayback Machine. User:Cyberpower678, a Wikimedia community member, established the project in mid-2015 by creating the en:User:InternetArchiveBot account to perform archival tasks.

• Millions of Old, Broken Wikipedia Links Have Been Brought Back to Life

Users can leverage the InternetArchiveBot to make edits on their own account using IABot

Access to archival resources

As an online archive the Internet Archive provides access to sources of knowledge which the Wikimedia community uses to develop content in Wikimedia platforms. In a typical interaction, a Wikimedia user gains access to published media through Internet Archive. If the user is a consumer, then they navigate from Wikimedia projects into Internet Archive to use and enjoy the media. If the user is an editor, then they similarly navigate into the Internet Archive, but they return to Wikimedia platforms to share and curate a link from Wikimedia content to the source material in the Internet Archive.

Open Library

The Open Library is the first, only, and greatest library to prioritize online users over the offline demographic. Wikimedia community members requiring access to books under a traditional closed copyright may gain this access through the Open Library. This is the only legal path to accessing these resources for most Wikimedia users.

Television news citations

The Internet Archive develops innovative technical and social infrastructure which is useful for everyone but particularly helpful for Wikimedia users.

Wikimedia projects continually seek to cite source material, but before 2017, the barriers to citing television media were so great that Wikimedia users rarely did this. At the television archive IA presents news video for the United States and a system for generating citations for it.

Programs and events

This list includes IA events which include Wikimedia programs or speakers.

• WikiCite 2018, including a Friday 30 November 2018 tour for Wikimedia contributors at the Internet Archive
• Public Domain Day 2019

Video for Wikimedia projects

In August 2015 Mozilla announced that they would no longer support the development of their online video editor, Popcorn. The video team at the Internet Archive participated in talks and prototyping to consider integrating the Popcorn software into MediaWiki for the mutual benefit of the Wikimedia, Internet Archive, and other online communities.

• en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Mozilla/Video & the Commons 2016
• en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Mozilla/Video & the Commons 2017

Policy

Wikimedia projects and Internet Archive have shared interests due to these shared characteristics:

1. natively digital media
   1. digital first, and prioritizing online audiences over offline demographics
   2. framing success metrics around online publication and online use
2. nonprofit
   1. conforms to nonprofit values like being apolitical and public interest
3. global audience
   1. the favored user is a typical individual seeking reliable information on any topic covered by digital media of general interest
   2. seeks to serve everyone on earth and avoid discrimination based on region or language
   3. based in English language and Western culture but continually adapting to be more diverse
4. community managed
   1. anyone can contribute
   2. discussions are public and permanent
   3. decisions happen in the open online
   4. significant community overlap in that fans of one platform tend to be fans of the other
5. legal environment
   1. United States headquarters and server location, and therefore comply with United States law
   2. while resident in the United States, seeking to publish and deliver content for all regions in the world
   3. stakeholder in United States law related to publishing, online platforms, and user access
6. favoritism for free and open content
   1. Presents non-free content, however...
   2. infrastructure provides more features and discovery around content with open copyright

Decisions, practices, infrastructure, and conversations of interest to one of these organizations is likely to be of interest to the other.

Research

The Internet Archive keeps a massive collection of data which requires curation to be more accessible and insightful. Wikimedia projects seek to summarize and profile all subjects of general interest after the model of an encyclopedia. Various researchers have expressed interest in conducting research to the mutual benefit of Internet Archive and Wikipedia. Proposed research collaborations could be the following:

1. Data science
   1. Disambiguate all authors
   2. Identify what media files in the IA's collection is actually a duplicate of another media file
   3. Cluster similar media; improve the catalog
   4. Enrich the source metadata
2. Information science
   1. Identify strengths and gaps in media coverage
   2. Interconnect IA resources with other Linked Open Data
   3. Internationalize the IA interface to be accessible across languages
   4. Secure the archive by preserving access to deprecated media formats

External links

• Archive.org, the official website