Just some of my favourite bits from an article on link rot in the New Yorker
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable.
Link rot
According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors
On footnotes
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy.
Internet historians far and few between
Last year, the Internet Archive made an archive of its .gov domain, tidied up and compressed the data, and made it available to a group of scholars, who tried very hard to make something of the material. It was so difficult to recruit scholars to use the data that the project was mostly a wash.
Source: The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?| New Yorker | Jill Lepore, 2015