pudge's Journal: Obama's White House Web Site Still Breaks Millions of Links

When (or slightly before) Obama became President, his people broke millions of links to historical transcripts and videos, removing them from the White House web site. For example, this link to President Bush's so-called "Mission Accomplished" speech. It's just gone.

This sort of loss is intolerable. It matters. And yes, I know you can still find the content in various archives. But maintaining the links themselves are crucial. These are the footnotes and bibliography of much of the Bush years.

What should happen is simple: first, Obama's people should a new whitehouse.gov hierarchy for historical documents, perhaps ordered by year, perhaps by President's name, whatever. So for example, http://www.whitehouse.gov/bush-43/news/releases/. Put all of Obama's content in a similar location, http://www.whitehouse.gov/obama-44/news/releases/. Then all of the Bush content should be restored to that locations. Next, all existing URLs to /news/releases/.. should be automatically redirected to the Bush archives. Do the same for Clinton if necessary. And when Obama is gone, his replacement won't have to do anything to keep those historical records alive: they will remain in that location.

This really is important.

Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.

Very Good Idea

[cmacb]

I hadn't thought about it and I doubt many have, but I have run into problems related to this turmoil. I once maintained a set of link to historical budget data. I think when Bush took office those links vanished and it took quite a while to find equivalent data, and even so, they had been converted from Lotus (that's how old they were) to PDF or something equally useless. I finally downloaded a set of the PDFs lest they disappear too.

When the Federal Government was mostly paper-based (and they still are to a too large extent) they used to move archival data from steel filing cabinets into cardboard boxes and then move those to warehouses with leaky roofs. By the time those archives needed to be references they were biology experiments. Giving bureaucrats the excuse they needed to just make stuff up.

They don't do much better with digital data. Hopefully they will farm out the job (and lay off a few fed employees hopefully) to companies that actually know how to preserve data. If not, archive.org and Google will at least preserve some of it and we'll still be better off.

Link breakage though is another problem and your idea would mean that things would not have to be constantly re-linked (if that's even tried). Let's see how the "obviously superior" Internet cabal that owns the Whitehouse manages all of this. So far it sounds as if they are no better than their predecessors.

Kottke's similar idea

[fishrokka]

Kottke covered this very issue back in January [kottke.org], and came up with a similar solution as your suggestion.

Re:

[pudge]

I mentioned it back in January or early February ... I didn't propose the solution because it seemed obvious and I figured they would do it. Still nothing though.

They like to torture people

[gringofrijolero]

It's just like the supermarket constantly rearranging everything. Serves no purpose other than to keep people busy. And the bureaucrat can justify his exorbitant budget. Making things simple would result in massive layoffs and further erode the economy.