New Year chores
You can open your genealogy software and search for persons whose BIRTH or CHRISTENING ... IS BEFORE 1914 because all of them meet the 110-year rule. You can add them as deceased to FamilySearch. While you're at it, do you have sources that are web links? What will happen to that copyright obituary when the funeral home goes out of business and shuts down the website, or simply deletes obituaries after a few years? You can learn hot to search for that source page on the Wayback Machine at ARCHIVE.ORG and see if it has been saved, and add a link in your data to the Wayback Machine copy for use if the original web page is gone. If there is no copy on the Wayback Machine that server will ask if you want to have the Wayback Machine copy the source now. You have to say YES twice and then wait while it copies the source page and adds it to the Wayback Machine, and then it will provide a link to the archived copy. Copy that link and also click on it to make sure that the archived copy is usable.
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As I understand it, Wikipedia has processes for ensuring the continuity of their references in this sort of way. The continued availability of FS sources is clearly equally important. Would you recommend that we carry this out on /any/ non-FS source?
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Websites come and go, and on a whim the site gets re-modeled and the old links no longer work, while the information is there but on a new URL. Illinois state archives come to mind. Yes, I recommend archiving the web sources but also you need to make sure the archive copy actually works. Sometimes the fancy bells and whistles don't copy and the archive has a meaningless page to display. Archiving the copies also documents the date on which the copy was made, and that it was in fact made from the original website, while a cached copy on another website might not. So yes, I recommend that FamilySearch start backing up URLs with URLs to copies on the Wayback Machine and/or other web archive sites. Like public TV, the Wayback Machine relies on donations. If you dance to the music, pay the piper.
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