Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

URL Arguments in API Calls Can Cause Intermittent Temporal Violations While Replaying Archived Web Pages  Michael L. Nelson 2026-05-26 Just over two months ago, I was at the ​ Information Stewardship Forum 2026 at the Internet Archive, where I was fortunate enough to present a lightning talk about making copies of copies, entitled " The Disintegration Loops: Generational Loss in Web Archives ".  During one of the breaks, Mark Graham asked Sawood Alam to take a look at a problem that had stumped the Wayback Machine support team.  I was sitting next to Sawood, and knowing my love for web archiving investigations, Mark invited me to take a look too.  The original inquiry: Hi, everyone! Got a concerning report from a patron alleging that WBM "URLs were intermittently displaying the current version of the website instead of the archived version." The URLs in question are: https://web.archive.org/web/20240222221058/https://www.victoriassecret.com/us/site-terms...

Figure 1: Snopes.com has no public captures on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine prior to October 2021. Snopes.com is a well-known fact checking website. It has been rated trustworthy by multiple rating organizations [1]. However, in 2021, BuzzFeed broke a story that, in fact, Snopes was plagued by plagiarized articles, and that authors were being told to plagiarize and then silently make updates to their articles after publication in the name of SEO . One of the byproducts of the BuzzFeed investigation is that there are no publicly available captures of Snopes.com in the Wayback Machine prior to 2021. Snopes’s official statement regarding this is that the founder, who was named responsible for the plagiarism, had a policy against Wayback captures; but, now that he was removed from duty, the board was going to change the policy going forwards. In fact, having no captures before 2021 means that the archives available give a more trustworthy historical view of Snopes.com than ex...

  The Disintegration Loops:  Generational Loss in Web Archives Michael L. Nelson As part of the Internet Archive's Information Stewardship Forum (March 18–20, 2026), I decided to use my five minute lightning talk to raise the issue of generational loss in web archives.  Or more directly, making copies of copies (...of copies…) – something that web archives currently do not do well.  My title is based on William Basinski 's four volume release " The Disintegration Loops ", in which he played the audio tapes of "found sounds", recorded decades earlier, in loops , with the whole process lasting over an hour.  The effect is hauntingly beautiful, with each loop slightly degrading the magnetic tape, resulting in a generational loss.  The degradation of each loop is right on the edge of the just-noticeable difference , until the entire track is reduced to just a shadow of its former self. I first discussed this topic in my 2019 CNI closing keynote ( slide 88 ), w...