Running IABot on a given Wikipedia site requires both technical integration and operations support as well as the approval of each related Wikipedia community. Two key people have worked on this project.
Maximilian Doerr, known in the Wikipedia world as “Cyberpower”, is a long time volunteer with the Wikipedia community and now a consultant to the Internet Archive. He is the author of the InternetArchiveBot (IABot) software.
Stephen Balbach is a long time volunteer whatsapp lead with the Wikipedia community who collaborates with Max and the Internet Archive. He has authored programs that find and fix data errors, verifies existing archives on Wikipedia, and discovers new archives amongst Wayback’s billions of pages and across dozens of other web archive providers.
The number of rescued links, and the quality of the edits, is the result of Max and Stephen’s dedicated, creative and patient work.
We learned that links to resources on the live web are fragile and not a persistently reliable way to refer to those resources. See “49% of the Links Cited in Supreme Court Decisions Are Broken”, The Atlantic, 2013.
We learned that archiving live-web linked resources, as close to the time they are linked, is required to ensure we capture those links before they go bad.