Shawn M. Jones

Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content

Increasingly, scholarly articles contain URI references to “web at large” resources including project web sites, scholarly wikis, ontologies, online debates, presentations, blogs, and videos. Authors reference such resources to provide essential context for the research they report on. A reader who visits a web at large resource by following a URI reference in an article, some time after its publication, is led to believe that the resource’s content is representative of what the author originally referenced. However, due to the dynamic nature of the web, that may very well not be the case. We reuse a dataset from a previous study in which several authors of this paper were involved, and investigate to what extent the textual content of web at large resources referenced in a vast collection of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles published between 1997 and 2012 has remained stable since the publication of the referencing article. We do so in a two-step approach that relies on various well-established similarity measures to compare textual content. In a first step, we use 19 web archives to find snapshots of referenced web at large resources that have textual content that is representative of the state of the resource around the time of publication of the referencing paper. We find that representative snapshots exist for about 30% of all URI references. In a second step, we compare the textual content of representative snapshots with that of their live web counterparts. We find that for over 75% of references the content has drifted away from what it was when referenced. These results raise significant concerns regarding the long term integrity of the web-based scholarly record and call for the deployment of techniques to combat these problems.

Persistent URIs Must Be Used To Be Persistent

We quantify the extent to which references to papers in scholarly literature use persistent HTTP URIs that leverage the Digital Object Identifier infrastructure. We find a significant number of references that do not, speculate why authors would use brittle URIs when persistent ones are available, and propose an approach to alleviate the problem.

Avoiding spoilers: wiki time travel with Sheldon Cooper

A variety of fan-based wikis about episodic fiction (e.g., television shows, novels, movies) exist on the World Wide Web. These wikis provide a wealth of information about complex stories, but if fans are behind in their viewing they run the risk of encountering “spoilers”—information that gives away key plot points before the intended time of the show’s writers. Because the wiki history is indexed by revisions, finding specific dates can be tedious, especially for pages with hundreds or thousands of edits. A wiki’s history interface does not permit browsing across historic pages without visiting current ones, thus revealing spoilers in the current page. Enterprising fans can resort to web archives and navigate there across wiki pages that were live prior to a specific episode date. In this paper, we explore the use of Memento with the Internet Archive as a means of avoiding spoilers in fan wikis. We conduct two experiments: one to determine the probability of encountering a spoiler when using Memento with the Internet Archive for a given wiki page, and a second to determine which date prior to an episode to choose when trying to avoid spoilers for that specific episode. Our results indicate that the Internet Archive is not safe for avoiding spoilers, and therefore we highlight the inherent capability of fan wikis to address the spoiler problem internally using existing, off-the-shelf technology. We use the spoiler use case to define and analyze different ways of discovering the best past version of a resource to avoid spoilers. We propose Memento as a structural solution to the problem, distinguishing it from prior content-based solutions to the spoiler problem. This research promotes the idea that content management systems can benefit from exposing their version information in the standardized Memento way used by other archives. We support the idea that there are use cases for which specific prior versions of web resources are invaluable.