Thanks for this! I'm talking about old scanned newspapers. :-) The Internet Archive has a good start, but it's pretty heavy on Kentucky, and few have in-text search available, which is killer if you're researching an event with few/no specific dates. (That's not to knock them—IA is pretty amazing, and OCRing newspapers is notoriously difficult.)
It's still /technically/ possible to search what's there via https://news.google.com/newspapers. Still, it's not exactly user-intuitive, and not being able to sort/search by date can make historical research very difficult (especially when the OCR isn't perfect—that's common, but trying several different phrases to make sure you've found everything is way easier when searching range of years).
Online newspaper archives are a ridiculously awesome boon for the humanities. Chronicling America from the Library of Congress, for instance, is great. It's the de facto successor to Google News Archive in the US. I just wish that Google News Archive could get a couple of the old search features back to aid researchers. :-)
Second, on a quick tangent I just discovered: when you select "archives" at news.google.com, it says "looking for scanned newspapers?" with a link to: https://support.google.com/news/answer/3334. But there's nothing there anymore about scanned news. :-)
This. Relatedly, losing an easy Google News Archive was killer for some of the research I'd like to do. Several papers/articles I wrote in c. 2010 would not be possible to do today.
Wikipedia admin here. Re your question, that's because you've accused the wrong editor.[1] :-)
Looking at the article at the time it was nominated,[2] there isn't much of an explicit claim to being notable under Wikipedia's policies.[3] However, it was nominated for speedy deletion all of seven minutes after you created it—pretty quick, something I never like to see for articles that fall into a grey area.
You're exactly right on RevDel (revision deletion). However, in this case only certain edits were restored after the article was deleted—but the copyright violations were left deleted, so there was no record of them in the public edit history.
That's why I've just restored the edits and revision-deleted the (copyrighted) text, leaving the editor and edit summaries public!
"It's a very interesting topic on which I know nothing about ..." --> you and literally everyone else I've met in my life. :-) Thanks for the compliment!
Thanks! You're talking to someone who's right in the middle of that conundrum--my Wikipedia writing has slowed down considerably since I started grad school, as I'd rather devote that writing to my papers.
That would be extremely difficult to do—you could for non-registered editors, as their IPs are recorded, but registered users' IPs are not publicly logged.
OP here. I'm planning to write something up on the most-viewed articles as well, but maybe a day or two after January 1st. I wanted to be able to capture the full year, unlike here (where we had to cut off half of December). Keep an eye out for it!
While I don't have a large sample size to prove this, incredibly high edit numbers on these sorts of non-news events tend to be just one person. These people are unpaid and can focus on whatever they want, and sometimes they just want to edit one page.
That said, accumulating /thousands/ of edits is definitely unusual. For example, my top-edited article is the South American dreadnought race, where I've made 800 edits over four years.[1]
For another example, last year's list had "Geospatial summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield" at #2.[2] It was just one person making over 7,000 edits.
I've been an editor on Wikipedia for years, and it's simply amazing how many web pages I referenced in 2008–09 have disappeared. Digital archivists have their hands full.