Wikipedia talk:HighBeam

Latest comment: 5 years ago by Bruce1ee in topic Discontinuation

cengage gale acquires questia & highbeam-research

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Xb2u7Zjzc32 (talk)

Registering your free account and Questia conflict

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  1. Go to http://www.highbeam.com/prof1
    1. redirects to https://www.highbeam.com/registration/Registration1
  2. You’ll see the first page of a two-page registration.
  3. Put in your email address and set up a password.
    1. (You need to use a different email address than you used if you ever signed up for a free trial).
    2. (You need to use a different email address than you used for Questia).
      1. a conflict redirects to https://www.highbeam.com
  4. After hitting “Continue”, the second and last page of registration appears.
    1. https://www.highbeam.com/registration/Registration2
  5. Input the basic information.
  6. Input the activation code
  7. Click “Finish”. You should be good to go at that point.
    1. "Your annual subscription is ready to use"
    2. "Congratulations. You now have unlimited access to more than 80 million articles from 6,500 publications."

Xb2u7Zjzc32 (talk)

Discontinuation

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Unfortunately, we've been informed that HighBeam Research will be closing within the next year, and therefore we are unable to continue creating or renewing free accounts for the site. If you still have an active account it should last the full year, but we can no longer renew accounts that have expired.

As one of The Wikipedia Library's first partners we're obviously sad to be announcing this! If you're looking for access to use in HighBeam's place, remember we have more than 50 other partner you can apply to on the Library Card platform. Of particular interest to you may be Newspapers.com, NewspaperARCHIVE.com, Gale, and EBSCO. If there are particular resources you're looking for, please let me know and we can help you find them. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 08:30, 24 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Pinging @Jpcase, Softlavender, and Bri: from above. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 08:33, 24 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
This is sad news. Has anyone seen or started a discussion about this elsewhere on Wikipedia? The closure is going to affect hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, and I thought it may have been mentioned at the Village Pump (or similar). I've used HighBeam to create and expand a number of those articles, and the loss of this service will definitely impact my editing. I've yet to look at the other Wikipedia Library partners, but HighBeam seemed to cater to my particular subject area well. Myself and a fellow editor will try and archive as many of the HighBeam links we've used before the closure, as we know we're unlikely to find them anywhere else. I do want to say thank you to those who gave editors the opportunity to use HighBeam for free though. - JuneGloom07 Talk 20:13, 26 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
I hope more editors that have made use of the HighBeam Research tool know about this and will have the time to archive the links they have used to better preserve articles. Perhaps it needs drawing attention to as there may be more editors willing to help. HighBeam has been a great source of information and inspiration for articles and I am sad to see it go.Rain the 1 10:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
By my last count there are well over 40,000 links to HighBeam on the English Wikipedia alone, so this would be quite the task. I wonder if @Cyberpower678: might be able to provide any assistance in archiving these links via InternetArchiveBot? Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 27 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
If they open their doors to Internet Archive's web crawlers, I can have them crawl their entire domain. Then IABot will be able to archive them all. Otherwise no.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:25, 27 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Is there any information if the content is integrated by another competitor? --Ureinwohner (talk) 16:49, 28 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

  • Any update on a preferred way-ahead, now that the Highbeam site itself is flagging its imminent closure? As pages viewed through HB show copyright elsewhere, usually with the source publication, I am guessing that will prevent a centralised re-capture of cited pages, so WP is going to suddenly have a large number of uncheckable references on articles. Or are Gale Cengage going to integrate former HB content, which could permit mapping? AllyD (talk) 11:15, 20 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
@AllyD: We're currently talking to HighBeam/Cengage about a way forward here - it's looking promising that we won't end up with 40,000 dead links. At minimum I now have a list of 7,000 Cengage URLs which can directly replace the Highbeam URLs, and we're chatting to Internet Archive to see if we can find a broader solution. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 12:32, 20 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • Thanks, sounds hopeful then. It seems inevitable that Highbeam's closure will detriment notability investigations (as per its inclusion in the Find sources AFD facility) but it will be good if a substantial proportion of main article references can be preserved in some way. AllyD (talk) 16:48, 20 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • IA have actually crawled all the ones they could now, we just need to organise the archive URL additions. And yes, the updated URLs I have are at Questia. I'm at a conference this week but will get into the details of organising this URL replacement/updating next week :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 05:19, 27 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
  • A quick update from looking into the data today. Of the 44,000 URLs (not just from en.wiki), 27,000 have been successfully archived by InternetArchive, the rest were mostly already dead links it seems. However we have new Questia URLs for 4,600 of the links that couldn't be archived, bringing us up to around 32,000 (74%) coverage in total. I'm speaking to Cyberpower to see how we can get IABot archiving those URLs, and I'm going to put in a bot task for replacing the other ~4600 links. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 11:52, 4 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Didn't notice this being mentioned above ... the links to HighBeam should not be removed or replaced (that is, removed and replaced with another source) as the sources WERE valid. Retention is in line with the notion that a source need not be reachable by a typical user for it to be nonetheless valid and useful. WP:SOURCEACCESS --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:56, 4 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

In this case the citation replacement is much more akin to a web address having changed than an entirely new source. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-100955529.html, for example, would be replaced with https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-100955529. We're not really replacing with another source, just updating the URL. Does that make sense? Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 10:58, 5 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Samwalton9 (WMF) and GreenC: Have all the HighBeam URLs on enwiki been converted to Questia URLs? I know of several HighBeam URLs that don't have corresponding Questia URLs (eg. this and this). Are these outstanding ones still to be converted, or is it the end of the road for them? The reason I'm asking is that I've been reverting InternetArchiveBot edits that are replacing HighBeam URLs with IA URLs that only show the paywalled version of the article (eg. here – see my edit summary). Should I continue doing this or stop? —Bruce1eetalk 15:34, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

@Bruce1ee: I would stop reverting IABot. The HighBeam pages often never showed the full content they were always paywalled snipits even when HighBeam was working. But the snippit is better than nothing (there is information about the source etc) and sometimes the snipit information contains what is needed to verify the cite. Ideally the citation would be replaced entirely to a better sources but failing that it's better to leave the archived snipit in place. -- GreenC 15:54, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Also if you do decide to remove, there should be a {{dead link}} added. But will also need to add a {{cbignore}} to stop IABot (and my bot WAYBACKMEDIC) from re-adding the archive later. -- GreenC 16:13, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@GreenC: Thanks for your reply – I'll restore those bot edits I reverted. Are there plans to convert the outstanding HighBeam URLs to Questia? —Bruce1eetalk 17:03, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Bruce1ee - If I recall, there was no way to automate because they didn't leave behind redirects and the URL syntax changes were not consistent. If you are seeing something that might be automated let me know, it's been a while since I looked at it and can't remember. -- GreenC 17:18, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, I'll have a look. —Bruce1eetalk 17:22, 9 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
Unfortunately there were a not insignificant number of Highbeam URLs that were dead before the migration to Questia and had no history tracked in IA. I'm not sure there's much we can do for them in a fully automated fashion. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:13, 10 April 2019 (UTC)Reply
@Samwalton9 (WMF): Thanks for that. I didn't realize there were dead Highbeam URLs before the migration. As I said above, I've restored the bot edits I reverted, and I won't revert them in future if they replace HighBeam URLs with paywalled IA URLs. —Bruce1eetalk 09:48, 10 April 2019 (UTC)Reply