Comment by ronsor
1 day ago
It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.
1 day ago
It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.
This is assuming they can't work out something with wikipedia to offer it for free (via a wikiforge tool, or bot) in exchange for the exposure of being the most common archive provider/putting a "used by Wikimedia" logo on their website.
The major reason archive.today was being used is that it also bypassed paywalls, and I don't think perma.cc does that normally.
Wikimedia could pay, they have an endowment of ~$144M [1] (as of June 30, 2024). Perma.cc has Archive.org and Cloudflare as supporting partners, and their mission is aligned with Wikimedia [2]. It is a natural complementary fit in the preservation ecosystem. You have to pay for DOIs too, for comparison [3] (starting at $275/year and $1/identifier [4] [5]).
With all of this context shared, the Internet Archive is likely meeting this need without issue, to the best of my knowledge.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
[2] https://perma.cc/about ("Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries. We’re both in the forever business: libraries already look after physical and digital materials — now we can do the same for links.")
[3] https://community.crossref.org/t/how-to-get-doi-for-our-jour...
[4] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#annual-membership-fees
[5] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#content-registration-fees
(no affiliation with any entity in scope for this thread)
> Organizations that do not qualify for free usage can contact our team to learn about creating a subscription for providing Perma.cc to their users. Pricing is based on the number of users in an organization and the expected volume of link creation.
If pricing is so much that you have to have a call with the marketing team to get a quote, i think it would be a poor use of WMF funds.
Especially because volume of links and number of users that wikimedia would entail is probably double their entire existing userbase at least.
Ultimately we are mostly talking about a largely static web host. With legal issues being perhaps the biggest concern. It would probably make more sense for WMF to create their own than to become a perma.cc subscriber.
However for the most part, partnering with archive.org seems to be going well and already has some software integration with wikipedia.
If the WMF had a dollar for every proposal to spend Endowment-derived funds, their Endowment would double and they could hire one additional grant-writer
Do you have experience with this? I'd like to hear more, really. I think this is the first time I've seen a suggestion for something new they can spend money on. I usually just see talk about where to spend less.
If the endowment is invested so that it brings very conservative 3% a year, it means that it brings $4.32M a year. By doubling that, rather many grant writers could be hired.
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