Help:Using WebCite

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 its 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.

Moving to a different provider

You can help deprecate WebCite!

Ideas to get rid of WebCite links:

Search archive.org and archive.today - although bots already did this, bots are sometimes imperfect and a manual search could find something the bots missed.
Find a different origin URL on the live web. For example, if the origin URL is to a Reuters story published in the NYT, there is a good chance that same Reuters story is available elsewhere. Use Google to search.
Saving the WebCite link at archive.today works well and is recommended, however .. do not save at archive.org see "Things to be cautious of" below.
PDF files at WebCite do not save correctly at archive.today

Saving a WebCite URL at archive.today follow these steps:

Save https://www.webcitation.org/5QE8rvIqH?url=http://www.birdlife.org at archive.today which will generate short-form URL https://archive.today/Jrvg8
URL shortening is disallowed on Wikipedia; click the "share" button to see the long form: https://archive.today/20070710111036/https://www.webcitation.org/5QE8rvIqH?url=http://www.birdlife.org
A potential SNAFU is there might also be https://archive.today/20070710111036/http://www.birdlife.org but this will probably contain different content then what you just saved at https://archive.today/20070710111036/https://www.webcitation.org/5QE8rvIqH?url=http://www.birdlife.org

Things to be cautious of:

It is not possible to save WebCite URLs at archive.org - it may appear to save correctly, but is an unreliable method. For why see this discussion.
Be aware of "content drift". When a web page has content that changes over time, such as stock prices or weather updates, this is called "drift". When the original WebCite snapshot was created it contains the intended information eg. current status of a typhoon at a certain day and hour. However, this page may change quickly, any any future snapshot of that same page will have different information. Thus when finding snapshots at other archive providers, be aware of content drift for certain types of pages.

Notes

Help:Using WebCite

Long-form URLs

Searching for previously archived web pages

Moving to a different provider

See also

Docs

Tools

Notes