WookieeProject Web is the response to the increasing need of support regarding the use of web resources on Wookieepedia. It is the result of several observations: web-content relevant to Wookieepedia interest is ever-growing, and its indexing is a real issue, especially in regards to its temporality, as we're constantly reminded that web pages and sites can vanish without warning; said indexing requires tools, such as citation templates and archives repositories; all of this requires the growth of some level of expertise from users; and finally, coordination on the issue has been limited in the past, and need to be reinforced. In itself, this WookieeProject is the continuation of previous isolated or coordinated efforts, such as the 2020 archive link project.
What WookieeProject:Web is proposing is a long-term hub for users to work together, and where they can:
Unlike most WookieeProject, our focus is more on "Research & Development", as we aim to structurally improve Wookieepedia use of web content, however there is nothing preventing participants from trying to improve articles (authors, web articles, websites), and push for those to reach status, which the WookieeProject would support (talk page template and nominations will be implemented to the project when needed).
Sure, editors have been adding links to articles since the inception of Wookieepedia, but it was often done in a non-systemic and highly subjective way, leaving out entire web pages and subjects in the dark. Websites since have come and gone, making it even harder for us to retrieve what's lost. That why we need a dedicated department to remove any uncertainty in our coverage of web content.
Indexing is the intellectual process involved when collecting, listing and sorting relevant terms (person, character, event, etc.) or documents to provide access to easy information retrieval. On Wookieepedia, it's the action of filling lists for Appearances and Sources, to put it simply. It's an essential task when working on an encyclopedia, and in theory, should be the first task completed when confronted with a new document.
Attribution and verifiability are Wookieepedia core principles, which we enforce through Sourcing. Without this we could not pretend to any level of standard and trustworthiness. The web is a network of documents, and those documents are essential to the attribution chain we rely upon, but if link rot happen to them, meaning that they are moved (change in the url address) or deleted (because the entity hosting them decided so), then nobody can access these documents through the links disseminated on Wookieepedia, and the attribution chain is broken. The only reliable solution to this major issue is the use of a web archive: a copy of a web page hosted on a specialized website, such as archive.org or archive.today. Without those we would have lost so many interesting content.