Web collecting

Fremantle2026 August 27 (Thursday), 7:33PM· Wikimedia · websites · MediaWiki · InstantCommons · I've written before about websites as collecting endeavours. That there's some good aspects to features like MediaWiki's insistence on not being able to embed foreign images. Keeping things together within one place, and pulling in things that we find elsewhere, can build a more coherent and resilient website. Having copies/duplicates/multiples of things, spread out and maintained by completely separate people or organisations, increases the chances that things will survive. The web is an ephemeral place. Some sites, such as many of those on the fediverse, don't like archiving. They have very clever systems of interchange that does result in multiple copies being hosted in different places, but they also have good systems of those copies being strongly linked — so they can all be deleted if the original is. In the more disperse indieweb world that's not really how it's done: some RSS feed…