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Thoughts on...Wizard Deleting their Online Archives

Awhile back, I was doing an Urban Legend piece that involved a Wizard interview between Judd Winick and George Perez that was on their website. I looked for it, and I couldn't find it, but now I hear (courtesy of the latest Lying in the Gutters, although I probably should have seen it somewhere else before that) that that is apparently because Wizard deleted their online archives!

What the heck?!

As Johnston mentions, that involved deleting

Brian Warmoth's "Cursory Conversations" interview column with webcomic creators, as well as Sean T. Collins' "I Can Has Comix" interview column with notable indie and small-press creators.

I get that it is easier to revamp online sites if you can just do a wipe on the archives, but really, isn't that just absolutely absurd for them to do? Wipe the archives to, what, save some time/money?

Ridiculous.

  • Posted on March 3, 2008 @ 02:41 PM

19 Comments

:(
That's seriously dissapointing.

Forget it, Brian. It's Wizard-town.

I guess there's always the Internet way back machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.wizarduniverse.com/

It gives me such a pleasant feeling when nifty internet pages/gadgets/tools are named after things I fondly remember from my yute.

The archives only go up to late 2007. Did the stuff after that not get archived? Now I REALLY want to see it!

It is somewhat reassuring to hear that a magazine which is so creatively bankrupt is also so ethically bankrupt.

Bad taste is so indicative.

It is somewhat reassuring to hear that a magazine which is so creatively bankrupt is also so ethically bankrupt.

Ethically bankrupt? What ethics did they break?

They deleted messages...they didn't kick a puppy.

Dan's probably referring to the link to Johnston's column, Scavenger, where Johnston mentions that a number of writers wrote free content for Wizard Universe, under the notion that they could point to those works to acquire future paid work - and then Wizard deleted them all, leaving said writers without the references they were promised.

Exactly. They convinced people to do freelance work without pay, in exchange for the resume credits, only to erase the evidence of what those credits were for. That kind of behavior can cost people work and damage their reputations.

It is somewhat reassuring to hear that a magazine which is so creatively bankrupt is also so ethically bankrupt.

The funny thing is, it really IS kinda reassuring.

Figures. I'd been meaning to look for updated links for a few articles, but hadn't gotten around to it. I guess I shouldn't bother.

(Seriously: if you're not going to move things around repeatedly, you only have to make one list of old articles. One column of old locations, one column of new locations, put it in your server config, and you're done.)

The archives only go up to late 2007. Did the stuff after that not get archived? Now I REALLY want to see it!

They've probably been indexed, but it takes around 6 months to get the pages into the Wayback machine. If they've been crawled, they'll start showing up over the next 6 months.

Hey guys,

Kiel from Wizard here. Just thought I'd drop a line to note that the reason past interviews were dropped was because the program we used to post stories on the older site made it impossible to just shift over all those stories. However, we are working on getting backups in place for a lot of those interviews that folks miss as soon as we can, and when they go live, you'll see them on the wizard main page and on the message boards. If there's something from the old site you'd really like to see posted, please drop by our boards or write us and let us know.

Thanks!

FunkyGreenJerusalem

March 4, 2008 at 4:40 pm

If there’s something from the old site you’d really like to see posted, please drop by our boards or write us and let us know.

Just the stuff you used to make money, but didn't pay for, in exchange for exposure, would be nice.

Wizard just sinks lower and lower every year, both in quality and ethics.

Kiel,

No offense, man, but I know the program used to build the old site and I know the program used to build the new site. Heck, I was one of the few people who lasted long enough there to be involved in both of 'em, to a degree. And it is DEFINITELY not "impossible" to move the files over. The old files are in a database that simply needs to be exported and then matched up with the new site's database. Problem solved.

So "impossible?" No way.

Impossible for Wizard to comprehend the importance of doing? I'll buy that. Impossible for Wizard to justify the use of an already overworked and underpaid (if paid at all) workforce in order to make this happen? Yup. I'll buy that one, too.

Don't let them feed you that line about "impossible," man.

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[...] As I mentioned in my Day One Report from Wizard World Chicago, one of the highlights of my time in the Windy City was Friday’s interview with writer Warren Ellis. It was a complete turnabout from my last experience interviewing him, as this time around it was actually a very pleasant conversation, full of laughs and topics that we both seemed to enjoy chatting about. My previous interview with him (while I was editor of wizarduniverse.com) was, well… difficult. I’m not sure if it was the oppressive heat, the chaos of San Diego Comic-Con or my affiliation with Wizard, but it was definitely not one of my finest interactions with an interviewee. (I’d link to it, but it was another victim of the Great Wizard Website Purge of ‘07.) [...]

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