Help:Using WebCite
 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
 | 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/. The archive no longer accepts new snapshots, and usage on English Wikipedia has been deprecated (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 it's 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
Links archived with WebCite should appear in long format (see RfC).
An example long format URL:
https://www.webcitation.org/5eWaHRbn4?url=http://www.example.com/
The 9-digit "Snapshot ID," similar to URL shortening services, contains a base 62 coded timestamp that can be extracted by bots and other programs. It also serves as a unique page ID. This is followed by the original URL which helps protect against malicious code that is hiding an inappropriate link, such as spam.
This archive URL can be inserted into the archive-url= and its supporting archive-date= and url-status= parameters in any of the citation templates. If the original URL is no longer accessible, the url-status parameter value should be set to dead. If the original URL is still accessible, the url-status parameter value should be set to live.
<ref>{{cite web |last= |first= |title= |work= |publisher= |date= |url= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status= }}</ref>.
Searching for previously archived web pages
Web pages previously archived a WebCite can be found through a search form at https://www.webcitation.org/query
There is also an API. Please contact User:GreenC for information how this works.
See also
Docs
- Wikipedia:Link rot, how-to guide for prevention of link rot
- Using the Wayback Machine, how-to guide
- Using Archive.today, how-to guide
- Using Perma.cc
Tools
- {{User WebCite}}, userbox
- User:UBX/WebCite, alternative userbox
- User:UBX/WebCite2, "I donated" userbox