Steve Marsden's WBM screenshot: The CEOP Home page for April 30, 2007 also refers to Missing Madeleine.

whodunnit wrote:@Joss---"I agree, that no one is under any obligation to deem WBM as 100% accurate in their archiving process"

Lol, well that's not what I said, exactly. Heretofore, WBM has been quite reliable and accurate.

"but could be said to be fairly reliable overall from what i have read about it"

Indeed. Read this! Just google 'Village Voice
Why Were New York Government Websites Hidden From an Internet Archive for 13 Years?

"Since its inception in 1996, the organization has become a critical resource for academics and researchers interested in the internet as a cultural repository. One part of the project, called the Wayback Machine, has been especially popular. It's like a time capsule for the Web, preserving copies of billions of pages, as they are, at a moment in time.
It couldn't be simpler; type in a URL, and the Wayback Machine will display snapshots of that URL on various dates. It's especially useful for looking back at deleted information, which has made the Wayback Machine an indispensable tool for journalists. Some politician decided to remove a particularly blockheaded press release from his site? The Wayback Machine sees all, and preserves every misstep."
~~~
I'm sure there are academics, researchers, and journalists who are keenly interested in whether or not they should continue to rely upon WBM. Up until now they haven't had any reason to distrust it.

whodunnit wrote:@Joss--"Why couldn't it be an error from CEOP's end, and once realized they wanted it amended a.s.a.p for obvious reasons?"


Finally! I've been saying this for daaaays.

As for an apparent inordinate amount of indexing for the April 30th capture, please read Dr. Roberts' latest comment to his Monday Monday piece. I'll reproduce his conclusion but the whole thing is worth a read:

"So what was the function of this small (entirely HTML driven) file – one that scarcely existed by comparison with its more mature siblings? If it only came on stream after 3 May then its first appearance in the WBM should have been 12/13 May, with a possible attribution to the first crawl date of its senior partner. But that would have been December 05!!

For me it wears the hallmarks of a ‘work in progress’. It was not drafted into the home page in its entirety, as there is only one ‘banner’ present, and that is at the top. ‘McCann.html’ has its own, which is not introduced into the larger collage. ‘McCann.html' was an altogether separate entity therefore, tagged onto the site address by default, i.e. not specifically ‘indexed’ as such, whilst only certain of its elements were pillaged.

I fear we really need an expert on the database tactics of the WBM to resolve this."

Nuala wrote:@ Whodunnit

very confident endorsement of it's capture

It was a standard reply, as one would expect. When questioned they then looked into further and confirmed the date was wrong.

Nothing suspicious about that.

A simple denial may be enough for you and some others

It's not just a simple denial, it's the other evidence as well.

Have you looked at the list of URLs?

Masses for 3rd Apr 2007, many indexing news articles that hadn't even appeared yet. There is a serious problem with that date, anyone with eyes can see it.

Nuala wrote:@ Joss

Could that date be an issue because someone in trying to rectify data on WBM, and in doing so has also messed up dates on the other data that has also appeared now to be in error?

The implication of what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that someone would have to have access to Wayback's data.

In other words, they would have to hack in to Wayback's data.

I think anyone willing to go down that route of conspiracy theory needs a reality check. Trying to make a theory fit, when it doesn't fit in any way shape or form, gets no-one anywhere, except going round in circles.

People need to accept the reality. The reality is that Wayback screwed up the URLs for CEOP's website for 3rd Apr 2007.

Not aiming that at you, I realise you were just asking a legitimate question.

Nuala wrote:@ Joss

What i was asking was can the person/s that made that data available to WBM if data was in error change that data if incorrectly submitted by the owner of the content by application to WBM staff to have it corrected?

Ah right, sorry I misunderstood.

No-one made the data available to Wayback, Wayback took it from the website.

The data that Wayback took was correct, but it's been archived with an incorrect date. Clearly no-one has asked Wayback to change anything because mccann.html had an incorrect date, which is now being corrected, so it wasn't corrected before, if you see what I mean.

Sam S wrote:Over 130 pages and counting. Seems an awful lot of effort is being put in to explain a simple "error". Never mind, confusion is good.

Nuala wrote:@ Joss

It states here in the section i bolded on their terms of use that indeed you can provide content to the archive.

Right okay, so to go back to your original question then:

What i was asking was can the person/s that made that data available to WBM if data was in error change that data if incorrectly submitted by the owner of the content by application to WBM staff to have it corrected?

I don't know. Neither do I think it's relevant, unless one is going down another conspiracy theory route, and I don't believe the pages from the CEOP website were submitted either.

Nuala wrote:@ Sam S

Over 130 pages and counting. Seems an awful lot of effort is being put in to explain a simple "error". Never mind, confusion is good

Couldn't agree more.

We have the evidence the URLs for 3rd Apr 2007 are screwed, all 3,000 pieces of evidence, plus Wayback confirming in writing.

At some point common sense has to kick in. However badly some people want some sort of preplanned conspiracy, the evidence doesn't fit the theory, and if the evidence doesn't fit the theory it can't be made to fit just because some so badly want it to.

Richard Henshaw wrote:"The nonprofit Internet Archive has an impossibly ambitious mission: to save a copy of every last piece of the public internet, forever, and to make the records freely available for anyone to use.

The archive currently stands at 2 petabytes, which is more than all the text contained in the Library of Congress. They've been treating the internet — the fleeting, here-today-gone-tomorrow internet — as something worth preserving.
Since its inception in 1996, the organization has become a critical resource for academics and researchers interested in the internet as a cultural repository. One part of the project, called the Wayback Machine, has been especially popular. It's like a time capsule for the Web, preserving copies of billions of pages, as they are, at a moment in time.
It couldn't be simpler; type in a URL, and the Wayback Machine will display snapshots of that URL on various dates. It's especially useful for looking back at deleted information, which has made the Wayback Machine an indispensable tool for journalists. Some politician decided to remove a particularly blockheaded press release from his site? The Wayback Machine sees all, and preserves every misstep.
So it's remarkable that for the past 13 years, some of the most important websites of New York State's government have been deliberately excluded from the archive, their records hidden from public view. Sixty-three "state.ny.us" addresses, to be exact, including the site of the New York State Assembly. Even more remarkably, the problem wasn't noticed until now.
The exclusion wasn't an oversight by the archive itself. The group's servers grab virtually every public webpage by default. According to the Archive's Chris Butler, someone within the New York State government requested, way back in 2001, that a broad swath of domains be eliminated from the archiving process.
"It was at a time when the Wayback Machine had only been public for a short time," Butler said, "for less than a year." Butler explained that the situation was particularly odd because government websites are among the group's highest priority for preservation. "They're obviously really important records."
Who requested that the sites be removed? Butler isn't exactly sure. And why? He's not sure about that either.

The archive is a pretty accommodating bunch; they'll exclude any website upon request by the owner or manager, and they don't demand an explanation. They do know it had something to do with the attacks of 9-11 — security concerns, presumably — but other than that, there aren't any notes in their system that would shed more light on the mystery.
How exactly this went unnoticed for 13 years isn't clear, either. Butler said the group has never received a call about it, although someone must have tried to look at an archived version of one of these sites at some point in the past decade.

The Voice has been unable to reach anyone in state government that might be able to clear things up. New York State's Office of Information Technology Services wasn't sure who would have been responsible for such a request. And this many years on, it's possible we'll never know the story.
The good news is that the Internet Archive has been backing up the websites all along — they just haven't been adding them to their public interface — and after a call from a reporter, public access has been restored.

XXXXXXXX wrote:"Lizzy Hideho Taylor
1 hr · Edited
I just spoke to Chris about the WBM issues to ask if there could be a further email about the reason the CEOP page appeared on April 30th. His response was that the email he sent to me initially was an acknowledgement of their error in the Timestamp (something to do with a 'subset') and that there really isn't anything else they can reply to.
He has become aware of the 'speculation' but basically cannot respond any further and suggested that if anyone has any queries about anything regarding the error and if they feel that there may be major implications they should contact the police and he will furnish them with any information necessary."

XXXXXXXX wrote:"Lizzy Hideho Taylor
1 hr · Edited
I just spoke to Chris about the WBM issues to ask if there could be a further email about the reason the CEOP page appeared on April 30th. His response was that the email he sent to me initially was an acknowledgement of their error in the Timestamp (something to do with a 'subset') and that there really isn't anything else they can reply to.
He has become aware of the 'speculation' but basically cannot respond any further and suggested that if anyone has any queries about anything regarding the error and if they feel that there may be major implications they should contact the police and he will furnish them with any information necessary."