I mentored a Google Summer of Code project to do just that - every citation on Wikipedia would be forwarded to Archive.org for permanent storage, and the citation link would be modified to offer the cached version as an alternative.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kevin_Brown/ArchiveLinks

For various reasons this didn't get completed or deployed. It's still a good idea though. IMO it should be rewritten, but it wouldn't be a lot of code. I'd love to help anyone interested.

(French Wikipedia already does this, by the way. Check out the article on France, for example - all the footnotes have a secondary link to WikiWix. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France)

Alexis said (at the IA 10th Anniversary bash) that they are going to have this running very soon, using a bot to go over all of Wikipedia and insert archived links close to the dates of existing references (if available), and also capturing newly added links.

Excellent. Alexis rocks.

>For various reasons this didn't get completed or deployed.

Could you list why? It looks like a sorely needed feature!

I would just like to say that the Internet Archive is a pretty small bunch of people and they have a lot of never ending work to do on a somewhat tight budget.

I would assume it's mostly that. They seem very accepting and willing to do a lot of things.

That's why I'm a "donation subscriber". If you'd like to know more about it, please visit: http://archive.org/donate/ - a subscription helps extra much, because it's a constant flow of cash. But one-time donations are of course of help as well.

It wasn't the IA's fault. At the time, the IA was already working on an API to submit URLs and to rapidly cache items, so we just needed early access.

The GSoC student didn't follow up with the process of getting it adopted. I didn't either, which I regret. I left the WMF in early 2012 so I guess it was dropped on the floor for a while.

That said I have since found out that others have taken up the charge.

How difficult would it be to create a bookmarklet or chrome extensions to save the current page you're on to Archive.org?

Bookmarklet (thanks to sp332):

javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location)))

Heck, the page has it half-written in the code for the "Save page now" button :)

  document.location.href='//web.archive.org/save/'+$('#web_save_url').val();

Sir, not all of us our javascript/HTML5 people. I do mostly operations, and can barely drag myself through Javascript until I get the chance to take some vacation time to concentrate on learning the web side (JS/HTML5/etc). I admit that I don't know what I'm doing sometimes.

Does this look right?

javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location)))

I hacked it together from what you posted and what my archive.is bookmarklet specifies: javascript:void(open('http://archive.is/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.l...)

EDIT: I can confirm that the bookmarklet I provided above does work. sp332, thanks for your help.

Here's Wikipedia's blurb on the subject, fwiw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources/Furth...

I am incredibly pleased at the save-page-now feature. Before there was a hack where using liveweb.archive.org might save a page on-demand, but you had no way of knowing. I'm adding this to my archive-bot immediately.

Here's page with my bookmarklet saved by itself :) http://web.archive.org/web/20131104224622/http://www.compone...

alternative : archive.is

Recently "vanished" by Wikipedia in response to a bot "spamming" WP with valid links to archive.is and archive.org.

http://enwp.org/WP:Archive.is_RFC

http://enwp.org/WP:Archive.is_RFC/Rotlink_email_attempt <-- conversation with archive.is operator or representative

http://enwp.org/WP:Using_Archive.is <-- "corrected"

http://enwp.org/Archive.is <-- deleted as "non notable"