One of the challenges of running Wikiwrimo is researching all the material that happened in past years. The NaNoWriMo website has a site archive, but the archive isn’t complete due to some of the archives being lost and the most recent years being missing. The Wayback Machine at archive.org wasn’t much help either, for the archive was way behind and didn’t have much to offer in the past few years from NaNo.
Until now.
I was looking up the 2009 article featuring YWP forum moderator Cylithria Dubois on the NaNo front page and couldn’t find it online thanks to the site wipe. (Even though what you see gets wiped every year, like the forums, the news archives generally remain. However, this year almost everything apparently got wiped in the transfer to Ruby on Rails.) Since this was an important citation for the article, I turned to the Wayback Machine even though I knew the archive might not work. And then it did. So I tried for the main NaNo website, and sure enough, there’s a NaNo page from June. Hooray! This will make researching for Wikiwrimo so much easier. There are even pages (though I don’t know how many since I haven’t clicked too thoroughly) for the lost year of 2004.
Researching things for Wikiwrimo just got so much easier.