JSTOR: Access Check

Wikimedia is not alone with this challenge. As noted in our 2025 global trends report, technology companies are racing to scrape websites for human-created and verified information. Content publishers, open source projects, and websites of all kinds report similar issues.

Sometimes online communities make wikis or YouTube explainers to keep track of certain storylines, but many seem to persist without ever being recorded. Shared memory is often maintained in ways that don’t translate to the readable archives produced by print-based textual tradition. On some level, this feels paradoxical, like the internet should ac... See more