Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rowing/FISA database errors

SportReference closing

In this list of database errors, and in a large number of articles, reference is made to sportreference.com. I see that they have announced that they are closing. I hope that the pages have been archived at web.archive.org (an arbitrary example which I checked had been), but it is worth bearing in mind that we are likely to find a large number of dead links if sportreference.com does disappear. --David Biddulph (talk) 21:06, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, this has been announced around 1.5 years ago, and they finally went offline in December 2016 – for a very short time. The plan was to sell the data (or the hosting?) to the IOC, which was supposed to provide it starting a few months later. More than a year later this has not happened yet, but they put Sports-Reference.com/Olympics back to operation and even updated the site in 2017 with 2016 Olympics information (which has some technical encoding problems, but hey…). To my knowledge "Sports-Reference" is only the provider of the data, which belongs or belonged to Olympstats or Olympedia (I can’t really tell how they are organized).

In fact, many Wikimedia editors were in touch with Bill Mallon, the most (?) important person behind Olympstats/Olympedia, to ask for details. Mallon actually has a Wikimedia account (User:Billbambam, have a look at his recent contributions as well). If the plan to move the data is still up to date, they might help us to migrate the many dead links if somehow possible. If that was not the case, I am sure that we will figure out some efficient (semi)-automatic migration by ourselves. —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:31, 9 January 2018 (UTC)