Archives can be created and references made to material that has been removed (for example, see RationalWiki).
And not just the example you cite. RationalWiki has written an entire MediaWiki extension specifically for the purpose of saving snapshots of Web pages, as people trying to cover their tracks happens a lot on some sites we run regular news pages on (Conservapedia, Citizendium).
Memory holing gets people really annoyed, because it’s socially extremely rude. It’s the same problem as editing a post to make a commentator look foolish. There may be general good reasons for memory holing, but it must be done transparently—there is too much precedent for presuming bad faith unless otherwise proven.
A simple mechanism to put the saved evidence in the same place as the assertions concerning it, rather than out in the cloud, is not onerous in practice. Mind you, most of the disk load for RW is the images …
And not just the example you cite. RationalWiki has written an entire MediaWiki extension specifically for the purpose of saving snapshots of Web pages, as people trying to cover their tracks happens a lot on some sites we run regular news pages on (Conservapedia, Citizendium).
Memory holing gets people really annoyed, because it’s socially extremely rude. It’s the same problem as editing a post to make a commentator look foolish. There may be general good reasons for memory holing, but it must be done transparently—there is too much precedent for presuming bad faith unless otherwise proven.
Seems like a heavy-weight solution. I’d just use http://webcitation.org/ (probably combined with my little program, archiver).
A simple mechanism to put the saved evidence in the same place as the assertions concerning it, rather than out in the cloud, is not onerous in practice. Mind you, most of the disk load for RW is the images …