Politically motivated climate data deletions

Re:Politically motivated climate data deletions by ada1981 on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @08:22AM (#13975941)

This seems to be happening with enough frequency that we citizens of the world ought to create a third party mirror of all gov data so as to withstand leadership transitions and politically motivated deletions.

I'd say someone like the UN should coordinate this, but it would probably be better done by a Wikipedia style outfit.

Maybe on the block chain. Perhaps we need a DataCoin that fuels keeping this stuff alive.

I'm curious how much data we are talking about and how difficult it would be for us to automate backing it up so this sort of issue isn't as devastating.

Might also be a way for us to cite data in such a way that it automatically triggers archiving.

Ie. Using http://dataarchive.org/govagency.gov/data/numbers would automatically store the source info as well as last accessibilily information.

Ideas?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Politically motivated climate data deletions by throwaway2016a on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @09:19AM (#13976298)

Replying to you to clarify the article since you are the top voted comment and I think it might lend itself to other people making conclusions they shouldn't without reading the article.

While I agree with you, I'm not sure that is the case here. The research is not deleted in this case, just literally the citations. Here it sounds more like:

Either

A. People editing citations in articles need to be less lazy and relocate missing sources

B. Research sites need to follow proper SEO best practice and use 301 redirects when they move files

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Politically motivated climate data deletions by mdekkers on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @09:54AM (#13976555)

RTFA - Data is actually being deleted, along with citations.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Politically motivated climate data deletions by throwaway2016a on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @02:15PM (#13979132)

I did RTFA and this paragraph threw me off:

> All in all, emails about defunct links of sites that weren’t saved are annoying, but harmless. Finding archived materials to replace them add maybe 20 minutes of internet searches to my day – and a bit of anger at the state of the country.

The way I read that was that the articles still existed elsewhere. But reading the article again I can see they are referring to other people's citations of the things that are deleted.

Also, the title itself:

> I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations

Citation is defined by the dictionary as:

> "a quotation from or reference to a book, paper, or author, especially in a scholarly work."

Not the source data.

So my apologies. I misread what the author was intending to say. But in defense if the author was intending to say that then the word citation in the title is used completely wrong. (or scientist have a different definition which I find odd)

Actually readying the article again. I am still not sure I was not right the first time. Deleting a citation is NOT deleting the source material. Deleting "cited material" is.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Politically motivated climate data deletions by ada1981 on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @10:49AM (#13976995)

Right this seems like what is going on. Or at the least, things were publicly accessible and now are not so there is no way of knowing if these data sets are alive somewhere.

[ Parent | on HN ]