Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

73 points - today at 1:34 AM

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defrost today at 3:11 AM
For any, like myself, wondering "Who is Ben Welsh" ?

  Hello. My name is Ben Welsh. I'm an Iowan living in New York City.

  I am a reporter, an editor and a computer programmer. My job is to use those skills, together, to find and tell stories.

  I work at Reuters, the world's largest multimedia news provider, where I founded the organization's News Applications Desk. In that role, I lead the development of dashboards, databases and automated systems that benefit clients, inform readers, empower reporters and serve the public interest.

  [...]
~ https://palewi.re/who-is-ben-welsh/
nomilk today at 3:08 AM
Couldn't figure out why archiving FTE aricles matters, but a quick search yields:

> Thousands of FiveThirtyEight articles seemingly vanish from the internet

https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/thousands-of-five...

And discussions here on hn:

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553

Disney erased FiveThirtyEight (article by Nate himself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703

arlattimore today at 4:07 AM
I'm not a soccer guy, but I still think the piece on Lionel Messi was awesome

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701122958/http://fivethirty...

nl today at 2:54 AM
This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.
internet2000 today at 3:44 AM
I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?
ChocMontePy today at 1:34 AM
ChrisArchitect today at 3:34 AM
Love Ben but title can simply be: Index of FiveThirtyEight articles preserved by the Internet Archive
3eb7988a1663 today at 3:39 AM
If I wanted to get the complete WARC archive of 538 - how do you do this in a friendly way? No interest in history tracking, just want the last available version from Internet Archive.
stinkbeetle today at 4:15 AM
Those 2015-16 ones sure aged poorly, I'm reminded of this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg

This is why people don't really buy the "but he had Trump at 30%, you just don't understand statistics" apologist line. Sure he hedged in the dying days of the campaign (a cynic might think to try to protect his credibility), but the tone overall was of a person who comprehensively failed to understand the mood of the country from beginning to end.

Which is a problem because these election predictions are not just pure "mathematical models" and "data driven" like 538 would have had you believe. What mathematical model should be used? What data should and should not be used? At some point those things are based on the modeller's understanding of reality.