In the United States there are several citation styles, but I learned Chicago, Turabian, and MLA (Modern Language Association). There are long manuals published for any type of situation: a book with two authors, a book with an editor, a book with an editor AND translator, an oral interview, a radio show, a movie clip. With the advent of the internet new standards had to be created, but all of them more or less require the same thing: name of the creator, name of the site, name of the institution affiliated with the site, date of access, and web address. So for example, this would be cited in Chicago style as:

Plait, Phil. "Why Is Vesta Groovy?" Bad Astronomy, October 1, 2013. Accessed October 2, 2013. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/10/01/asteroid_vesta_grooves_indicate_it_may_be_more_planet_like.html

When I first learned these methods something immediately came to mind: link decay. I know why they add the access date: to say when the writer looked at the page and to show how it could've changed since then. But then again, what if the website doesn't exist at all? Scholars put a lot of emphasis on footnotes because that's what proves your point, and I feel they spend more time glancing at the bottom of the page than your actual article. People ask me where I get my books from; well, I just saw what another author cited and then borrowed it from the library to see what he was talking about.

But websites are constantly changing. The author I cited, Phil Plait, is famous in the science community not only for making astronomy accessible for laymen like myself but also for pushing inoculation, science education, and global warming, and I'm certain plenty of students have cited him at some point. About a year ago, Plait moved from Discovery Magazine to Slate. Currently Discovery is keeping his archive on their site, but who knows how long that'll last? Later on when someone reads a student's dissertation and sees a link to Plait's blog, will that article still be there?

It seems my misgivings were correct. A few days ago The New York Times released an article saying 49% of the linked citations for the Supreme Court decisions no longer exist. And the internet is relatively new. Does that mean about half a century from now we'll look at the Supreme Court and have no fucking idea why the hell they argued a certain way and only have a link to something like "/dogs-on-virgin-pussy.html?" You just sit there and wonder what the fuck was on that website that changed the course of American law?

It's not just the Supreme Court. Everything coming out of the academic world is at risk. We have things like the Internet Archive which is trying to keep a library of all the information we spew out, but no one's citing that nor can it keep up with every comment on every video that may be mentioned. This is a serious problem that the academic world needs to address as we become more reliant on the information age.

Does anyone else besides me find it ironic that I linked to shit that too may decay in a few years? That was part of the problem with my Xanga; I'd write about something and there'd be all these comments, but the link to what I was talking about didn't exist anymore.