WebCite facts for kids
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| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Owner | University of Toronto |
| Created by | Gunther Eysenbach |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 1997 |
| Current status | View historical archives only, no new archives |
WebCite was a special website that helped save copies of important information from the internet. Imagine you find a cool fact on a website for a school project. If that website changes or disappears later, you might not be able to show where you found the fact. WebCite was designed to take "snapshots" of web pages. This meant that even if the original page changed or vanished, the saved copy on WebCite would still be there. This helped people, especially scientists and students, check information they had cited.
As of June 2023, WebCite stopped taking new requests to save pages. However, you can still look at the old pages it saved. The website has sometimes been offline for long periods, but it usually comes back online.
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What WebCite Could Save
WebCite was able to save many different kinds of web content. This included regular web pages (HTML), PDF documents, and even pictures. It also saved details about these pages, like when they were saved and what type of content they were.
WebCite was a non-profit group. This means it wasn't trying to make money. It was supported by publishers and editors. Anyone could use it for free to save web pages. It was one of the first services that let users choose exactly which pages to save. Other services like archive.today and the Wayback Machine later added similar features. WebCite did not "crawl" the internet like search engines do; it only saved pages when someone asked it to.
How WebCite Started
The idea for WebCite came from Gunther Eysenbach in 1997. He publicly talked about it in 1998, explaining how such a service could help check the quality of information on the internet. A test version of the service started in 1999.
Even though other services like Google Cache and the Internet Archive also started saving web pages, WebCite was unique because it let users decide which pages to save. It also worked with academic journals and publishers to automatically save the links they used in their articles. By 2008, more than 200 journals were regularly using WebCite.
WebCite used to be part of a group called the International Internet Preservation Consortium. However, WebCite didn't have enough money to pay the yearly membership fees, so it left the group.
WebCite also shared its saved content with other digital preservation projects, including the Internet Archive. A famous American academic, Lawrence Lessig, even used WebCite to support his arguments in a big court case in the Supreme Court of the United States.
WebCite stopped accepting new requests to save pages sometime between July 9 and 17, 2019. It also had a long outage from about October 29, 2021, to June 24, 2023, during which saved content was not available.
How WebCite Was Funded
In 2013, WebCite tried to raise money to keep its service going and make it better. They needed money to move their service to a cloud hosting system and for legal help. At that time, they were still deciding if they would continue as a non-profit or become a for-profit company.
WebCite did not charge individual users or publishers to use its service. It made money from publishers who wanted their publications to be analyzed and their web references saved. The University of Toronto also provided early support.
Copyright and WebCite
WebCite believed that saving copies of web pages was allowed under copyright laws. They argued that their saved copies were for academic research and did not harm the original work's value. They also said that if a website didn't specifically say "do not save," it gave an "implied license" for services like WebCite to save its content. WebCite would not save pages that had special codes telling archives not to.
A court case in the United States in 2006, Field v. Google, agreed with this idea. The court said that Google's saving of web pages did not break copyright laws because of "fair use" and an "implied license."
Removing Saved Pages
If a copyright owner asked WebCite to remove a saved page, WebCite would move it to a "dark archive." This meant the page was no longer available to the public. However, if there was a legal reason or a request for evidence, people could pay a fee to access these hidden copies.
See also
In Spanish: WebCite para niños
- Archive.today
- Perma.cc
- Wayback Machine
