Image credit: Annie Rauwerda, photographed by Ian Shiff, smiling in February 2023
Annie Rauwerda can’t remember a world without Wikipedia. Born in 1999, just two years before the platform launched, she says it has been omnipresent in her life and a source of endless fascination.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when she was a neuroscience student at the University of Michigan, Rauwerda said she spent a lot of time on Wikipedia and started posting quirky stories she found.
“As I clicked around, there were so many things with goofy titles,” said the now 26-year-old. “I thought to myself: ‘This could be big.’”
Making as many as five videos a day, Rauwerda indeed gained an audience with her off-beat discoveries — from stolen and missing moon rocks to the back story of people demonstrating “high fives.” She created Depths of Wikipedia, a group of social media accounts and has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 200,000 on TikTok, and 130,000 on BlueSky.
In October, Rauwerda was invited to present at the Internet Archive event in San Francisco celebrating the milestone of 1 trillion webpages saved. She brought a burst of energy and humor to the stage as she shared screenshots of some of her favorite Wikipedia articles.
Watch Annie at Internet Archive’s 1 Trillion Web Page Celebration:
Rauwerda calls herself an Internet Archive “super fan” and acknowledges its value in providing links to original sources.
“If Wikipedia is worth anything at all, it’s because of the citations, and those citations are increasingly hard to access,” she said, noting that more than half of the community articles contain a dead link. “That’s not a concern, though, for us, because we have partnerships with the Internet Archive to make sure that those links are archived and can be clicked by anyone.”
Professionally and personally, Rauwerda said she uses the Archive constantly as she looks for material, seeks out old blogs or edits Wikipedia pages.
“It’s really hard for me to think of an organization that I’m more enthusiastic about,” Rauwerda said of the Internet Archive. “I just love everything about it.”
What will matter most to future generations is hard to predict, Rauwerda said, so it’s crucial to save as much of the digital landscape as possible. “I’m thankful the Internet Archive exists,” she said, “especially given how fragile everything is online.”
Rauwerda said she’s had a “simultaneous love affair with the Internet Archive and Wikipedia” — often toggling back and forth as she dives into topics. She said she embraces the spirit of the open web and the community of people who support this work.
Beyond her social media presence, Rauwerda is writing a book about Wikipedia for Little Brown. The series of light-hearted essays about the off-beat people behind Wikipedia is slated for publication in the fall of 2026.
Rauwerda also turned her discoveries into a comedy show, which she first performed at small clubs in New York. After landing an agent, she went on a multi-city tour of the U.S., customizing the material for each region. She has another round of shows booked for 2026.
“It’s been so fun,” she said. “I’m gonna ride this while it lasts.”
Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.
WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.
The free Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, publicly launched last fall, combats link rot by seamlessly redirecting the user to a reliable backup page when it encounters a missing page. When the plugin is added to a website, it will do a scan, see what pages exist, and then automatically save those pages to a queue to be archived. If it doesn’t exist, then it will be sent for capture.
Once the software is installed on a WordPress website, the plugin will auto redirect users to the Wayback Machine version of a missing page.
Broken links are one of the web’s most relentless problems. Pew Research found that 38% of the web has disappeared over the past decade and for web admins, “It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to keep links working,” said Matt Blumberg, Product Manager with the Wayback Machine. “This new tool prevents those inevitable 404s by automatically updating links to a preserved copy and it proactively archives pages in the Wayback Machine, where they’re kept accessible for free, long-term, so your site stays usable without manual fixes.”
“It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory. We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.”
Alexander Rose, Director of Long-term Futures for Automattic Inc.
Many WordPress websites are homespun and are most susceptible to having links go dead. Remedying this problem is not only valuable to individuals, but also to the overall culture, said Alexander Rose, Director of Long-term Futures for Automattic Inc., the technology company behind WordPress.com.
“We need to have an accurate memory of the things that get said, posted, and the ways that we have communicated over time,” Rose said. “Otherwise we’re either doomed to repeat errors or we’re going to make choices that are uninformed by the past.”
The link fixer is expanding the “heroic effort” made by the Internet Archive over the years to preserve everything from small websites to NASA.gov and WhiteHouse.gov, he said.
“It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory,” Rose said. “We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.”
As the plugin rolls out, Rose and Blumberg said they are open to feedback. The goal is to make the software as easy as possible to use. Next, they will fine tune the features and promote its broad use.
“As it becomes a solid piece of software that people know and like, then I think it has a path to being integrated much more deeply,” Rose said. “It’s early days, but every person I’ve talked to about it is excited to see the potential end of the dreaded 404 error.”
Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages.
The web has become not only a source of information but also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists to use digital archives to reconstruct timelines, verify claims, uncover hidden connections and hold powerful actors to account.
As online materials grow more fragile and prone to disappearance, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been critical in making “lost” web pages available – recently celebrating archiving over a trillion pages.
We are also interested in how others use web archives across fields, and what we can learn from each other.
In this piece we draw on the Internet Archive’s News Stories collection to surface practices and use cultures of the Wayback Machine amongst journalists and media organisations. We analysed a dataset of about 8,600 news articles, assembled by the IA via daily Google News keyword searches since 2018.
Drawing on a combination of digital methods, machine learning and lots of reading – we surfaced nine ways that journalists use the Wayback Machine in their reporting.
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1. following what is deleted
Shifting political alliances are a common driver of online footprint erasure. Deleted tweets have revealed past critics in current allies (here and here), and current career aspirations were juxtaposed with earlier conflicting stances in personal blogs and websites (here, here, here and here).
Unannounced takedowns of collections or site sections on government websites often prompt investigations using archival snapshots. Examples include removed editions of presidential newsletters and deleted staff contact lists for services supporting vulnerable groups, signaling access-to-information breaches.
The removal of official publications also enticed further contextualisation, revealing cases in which information was deleted due to being incomplete, inaccurate or inconveniently timed.
Beyond politics, erasing on corporate websites highlights commercial and reputational pressures, such as deleted statements on forced labour, product safety and climate deception.
2. following what has been altered
Subtle alterations on webpages can also reveal a plain-to-see effort to reshape narratives.
In other cases, small additions to online content have proved just as revealing. A before and after snapshot of a blog post showed how a supposed early warning about a virus threat was added only after the pandemic began. Similarly, changes to a social media platform’s API rules appeared shortly after third-party apps were banned, subtly reframing the policy to align with new restrictions.
3. following what is banned
Sometimes removals are deliberate, often at the request of companies seeking to enforce copyright, control branding, or limit liability.
Archived snapshots are also often the only way to reconstruct what preceded a link break, when it happened, and what information was effectively cut off.
For example, an investigation into a set of broken URLs on a government website revealed that the pages themselves had not been removed, but the links pointed to outdated servers, creating a false impression of secrecy that sparked a conspiracy theory.
In another case, a major technical glitch took multiple Nigerian government websites offline, cutting off access to official information and showing how even unintentional failures can undermine transparency.
5. following what is hacked
Compromised versions of hacked websites and social media accounts present another form of using archived snapshots as traceable historical record.
For example, past screenshots of Twitter’s bio page revealed inconsistencies in claims about an alleged takeover of the US president’s social media account. In other cases, such snapshots helped surface a forensic trail and distinguish unauthorised activity carried out by activists (here and here) from the ones linked to cybercriminal groups (here).
6. following what is connected
Archived web data often uncovers unexpected linkages between domains’ ownership that appear unrelated on the surface.
For example, journalists used analytics codes of copies of sites maintained by the Wayback Machine to uncover disinformation networks. In another investigation, archived records verified that a website redirect to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign was unrelated to him, debunking conspiracy theories about the domain’s ownership.
Snapshots of a fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page and its associated websites allowed reporters to trace the individuals behind the operation. Similarly, archived versions of Amazon storefronts exposed networks of accounts generating affiliate revenue from coordinated product listings.
7. following what is reported
Archived web pages have proven vital for tracing how stories are presented across media outlets and platforms.
In another case, snapshots of the Google homepage captured during the 2018 State of the Union speech disproved a viral claim that Google ignored Donald Trump’s address in favour of Barack Obama.
8. following what is unchanged
In other investigations, the most revealing detail is what did not change.
For example, during a bushfire crisis in Australia, archived pages showed that a key policy statement by the Greens party was left untouched, despite a disinformation campaign claiming to the contrary.
Similarly, a social media account circulated as having been reactivated under a new wave of laissez-faire moderation was, in fact, never suspended.
9. following what is saved
When forums, platforms and websites vanish, it’s the work of crowdsourced archivists that capture their traces before they vanish for good.
These are some of the ways we’ve noticed journalists using web archives – and there are many more! If you know of other interesting examples, we’d love to hear from you.
We hope that these nine ways may help to inspire critical and creative uses of web archives to “follow the changes” – exploring what they can tell us about digital culture and society, and the times we live in.
Thais Lobo is research associate at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, with a previous career in journalism.
Jonathan W. Y. Gray is Co-director of the Centre for Digital Culture and Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab; research associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work at jonathangray.org.
Liliana Bounegru is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Media, Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab, member of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and associate of the Sciences Po Paris médialab. More about her work can be found at lilianabounegru.org.
When songs enter the public domain, they don’t just get older, they get new lives. For this year’s virtual Public Domain Day celebration, musician Stephanie Woodford gave three newly public-domain classics a fresh voice by writing new lyrics, reimagined for today.
Partygoers were treated to live performances of Georgia on My Mind and Dream a Little Dream of Me, while a third reinterpretation, On the Sunny Side of the Street, lives on as a special recording. Together, these performances show what the public domain makes possible: creativity that’s playful, personal, and very much alive.
Dream a Little Dream of Me
Music composed by Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. (1930)
Georgia on My Mind
Music composed by Hoagy Carmichael, with lyrics by Stuart Gorrell. (1930)
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Music composed by Jimmy McHugh, with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. (1930)
Stephanie Woodford is a pop, soul, and RnB singer/songwriter and performer. She is a graduate of both the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division and also St. Ignatius College Preparatory High School. She has a degree in music from City College of San Francisco.
This week, Internet Archive celebrated Public Domain Day with a lively mix of ideas, art, and community. Session recordings are now available to revisit or discover the highlights.
In our daytime virtual session, we invited audiences to step into The Case of the Disappearing Copyright, a playful, thought-provoking celebration of the works newly freed into the public domain. Watch the recording.
Our in-person party turned Public Domain Day into a lively celebration of art, film, and the public domain. Artist in residence Cindy Rehm shared The Seers, her public-domain–inspired work, followed by a screening of the winning films and honorable mentions from the Public Domain Film Remix Contest. Watch the livestream.
Join us THIS WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21 for three different ways to celebrate the creative works from 1930 and the sounds recordings from 1925 that have entered the public domain in the US:
The Our Future Memory movement continues to grow, with the EveryLibrary Institute (ELI) formally joining the global coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online. ELI’s participation brings a powerful policy-focused perspective to the effort to ensure that libraries, archives, and museums retain the rights they need to fulfill their public mission in a digital world.
EveryLibrary Institute explained its reason for joining the Our Future Memory movement:
By joining the Our Future Memory coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online, the EveryLibrary Institute is hoping to advance a broader conversation that reaches beyond copyright reform alone and asks deeper questions about ownership, stewardship, creativity, and the future of reading in a digital society. We believe that this conversation must include libraries and educators, but also independent booksellers, independent publishers, authors, technologists, policymakers, and readers themselves. The health of the creative economy and our democratic society depends on getting this right.
About the Statement
The Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online aims to safeguard the essential digital activities of libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as “memory institutions”). It urges policymakers and communities to ensure these institutions retain the same rights and responsibilities online that they have historically held offline, including the rights to:
Collect digital materials, including through digitization and lawful acquisition;
Preserve digital works, including repair, backup, and reformatting for long-term access;
Provide controlled access to digital collections for research and public use; and
Cooperate across institutions by sharing and transferring digital collections to strengthen preservation and access.
CNNThe New YorkerThe New York TimesKQEDScientific AmericanArs TechnicaBBC NewsNPRIEEE Spectrum
In 2025, a global conversation emerged about memory, power and who controls the historical record. As governments deleted web pages, platforms broke links, and public data quietly (and not so quietly) disappeared, journalists around the world turned to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine to understand what was being lost, what could still be saved, and why preservation matters more than ever. From investigations in The New Yorker and The New York Times to video features from the BBC and CNN, these stories capture how the fight to preserve the web became one of the defining information battles of the year.
UPDATE January 21, 2026: Contest winners have been announced. Congratulations to the winners, honorable mentions & finalists, and special thanks to everyone who submitted a film this year!
We invite filmmakers, artists, and creatives of all skill levels and backgrounds to celebrate Public Domain Day, by creating and uploading a 2-3 minute short film to the Internet Archive.
This contest offers a chance to explore and reimagine the creative treasures entering the public domain, especially works from 1930 that entered the public domain on January 1—classic literature, early sound films, cartoons, music, and art. Participants are encouraged to use materials from the Internet Archive’s collections to craft unique films that breathe new life into these cultural gems. Browse newly opened public domain materials.
Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500, with winners announced during our virtual and in-person Public Domain Day Celebrations on January 21, 2026. All submissions will be featured in a special Public Domain Day Collection on archive.org and highlighted in a January 2026 blog post.
Join us in this creative celebration of cultural heritage and timeless art!
Note: If you have a resource from 1930 that is not available on archive.org, you may upload it and then use it in your submission. (Here is how to do that).
Your submission must have a soundtrack. It can be your own voiceover or performance of a public domain musical composition, or you may use public domain or CC0 sound recordings from sources like Openverse and the Free Music Archive.
Note: Sound recordings have special status under Copyright Law, so it’s important to note that while musical compositions from 1930 will be entering the public domain, the sound recordings of those works are not. Sound recordings published in 1925 will enter the public domain.
Mix and Mash content however you like, but note that ALL of your sources must be from the public domain. They do not all have to be from 1930. Remember, U.S. government works are public domain no matter when they are published. So feel free to use those NASA images! You may include your own original work if you put a CC0 license on it.
We are celebrating the public domain as a triumph of human creativity, and we want your submission to reflect that spirit. The contest honors the imagination, craft, and originality that people bring to remixing culture, so your final film should be a human-made work of art. If you use AI tools in your submission, please explain how they are used.
Add a personal touch, make it yours!
Keep the videos light hearted and fun! (It is a celebration after all!)
Submission Deadline
All submissions must be in by 11:59pm PST, January 7, 2026.
To help get you started here are some materials that will become part of the public domain on January 1, 2026.See examples.
Books: The first four original editions of the Nancy Drew books, including The Secret of the Old Clock. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Dick and Jane made their first appearance in the Elson Basic Readers. The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper choo-chooed onto the scene.
Comics: The iconic Blondie by Chic Young first debuted in 1930. Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in comics in 1930 featuring multiple serialized storylines! Even more Popeye stories including those featuring the Sea Hag!
Films: The King of Jazz, a two-strip Technicolor musical revue featuring Bing Crosby, elaborate sets, and Vaudevillian routines. Morocco, a melodrama featuring Marlene Dietriech pushing the boundaries of pre-Hays Code Hollywood. All Quiet on the Western Front, the Best Picture winning adaptation of the novel. Dizzy Dishes, the first appearance of Betty Boop in film. The Picnic, a Disney short featuring the debut of Rover, the dog that would become Pluto a year later.
Musical Compositions: It Happened in Monterey, a song of longing for romance past. But Not for Me, a lament about love songs. Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight, a carefree celebration. Dream A Little Dream of Me, a wishful request of longing. Beyond the Blue Horizon, a song that invokes our own blinking servers that made 1 trillion webpages possible. Georgia on My Mind, a song that became the official state song of Georgia in 1979. You can record your own versions of any of these compositions and reuse them in your film.
Sound Recordings (1925):A Cup Of Coffee, A Sandwich & You, a fox trot rendition by the Carleton Terrace Orchestra. St. Louis Blues by Bessie Smith ft. Louis Armstrong on the cornet. I’ll See You in My Dreams by the Isham Jones Orchestra, the top selling record of 1925. Manhattan by Ben Selvin Orchestra as The Knickerbockers, a jazzy evocation of the city.
Prizes
1st prize: $1500
2nd prize: $1000
3rd prize: $500
Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1930. Submissions should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners will be announced and previewed at our virtual event, then shown on the “big screen” and celebrated in person at the in-person Public Domain Day party in San Francisco. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.
Queline Meadows’s inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time.
A rich montage of sound and picture, focusing on images that model beauty, fitness, posture, proper behavior, and the laws of physics to produce an unpredictable result.
This trippy piece creates a visual experience unlike others with animation, bold colors, and unique framing to draw the viewer in and invoke experimental filmmaking of later decades with older materials.
For further reference, check out past entrants from 2025.
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