This may violate the 20 year rule because it involves technology of the last 20 years. However, my question is directed more to the historical method than history itself.
How would future historians access our primary sources as our primary sources transition from physical to digital media? For example, in this study it was found that 70% of links in Harvard Law Review articles and 50% of US Supreme Court opinions no longer refer to the original source material. As we continue to move from digital to physical media for news, personal correspondence, and distributing academic materials, there is an increasing danger of the source disappearing due to link rot or the original source being revised after the fact. This leads to my question - how could historians address the problem of disappearing primary sources or primary sources being edited after the fact?
This is in contrast to even as recently as 20 years ago, when most sources were printed on physical media that were likely to last longer and could not be revised after the fact. For example, a newspaper could easily last for ~100 years after being printed, if in the right climate conditions, and can’t be changed once printed. A stone carving obviously even longer. However, Internet hosted material could be edited, revised, deleted, or moved instantly. How will this impact future historians?
Edit - Grammar because I was on mobile (which also illustrates my point).
Let me talk about some current research where I've run into the problem (you are assuming it will only affect future historians ... if only!)
I had found a few late 1979 computer magazines (including this one from Kilobaud, December 1979) mention of a game it called Original Adventure, advertised as a port of the original Crowther/Woods Adventure from 1977.
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
(I was going to link here the Crowther/Woods version from the Halt and Catch Fire website -- it's a plot element in the TV show -- but that version seems to be broken as of a few months ago. More fun with linkrot! Try the version here instead.)
Now, what caught my eye about the ad was the mention that "This adventure is Bi-Lingual -- you may play in English or French".
This is a big deal -- previous to this, the earliest known text adventure in French was from 1982 (as of a few months ago we now know of one based on the WWII prison Colditz from 1980/81, but that's still not as old) but as the magazine ad was the only record I had from all my references, I had to go searching for a copy. My first attempt led to the ERIC archive and this rundown of various pieces of software for language learning, written in 1982. It had the good fortune of giving full names of the authors:
La Grande Aventure (Original Adventure) by Willie Crowther, Don Woods, Jim Manning, Ancelme Roichel, and Harley Licht Published by Creative Computing Software
The full names were sufficient to find a book that Ancelme Roichel (also known as Claude Kagan) had written. He had devised his own computer language called SAM76 intended to be "universal" and not connected to regular spoken language (the end result is esoteric and not friendly to use, but that's a different discussion). He used the language to help make the port of Adventure, but I couldn't contact him because I knew from elsewhere that he had died.
These are not terribly old pages -- when I visited in 2019 the last update was only a few years before, but nonetheless, when I visited, there were a number of dead links. Fortunately, the Internet Archive had kept this particular page, and the downloads, and I found in a SAM76 archive file a full copy of Bilingual Adventure. So we now have preserved the earliest non-English text adventure for home computer and you can even play in your browser via this link. But it was linkrot of a page that was updated quite recently!
Even with the Internet Archive, one of the big problems isn't linkrot as much as discoverability. I was able to find the memorial page via normal web searches; while I'm fairly canny about searching for old things, if the page had been indexed but deleted much farther back, I wouldn't have found it at all. In this case it wouldn't be impossible to rescue the game but it might have taken much longer (I found a museum in the UK had a copy, although it is unknown the state of preservation).
The Internet Archive also doesn't necessarily save everything. A website can have ROBOTS.TXT which prevents indexing, or there may be dependencies based on embedded Flash or the like that don't get fully saved. For example, the Interactive Fiction Competition (which has run since 1995) has been very good about archiving the entrants from every year, but even then, 2002's work Sun and Moon is now unplayable -- it was meant to be sort of a hybrid alternate-reality game, and while the relevant web site got stored here, part of the code is missing so the game is unplayable.
You can read my full write-up about Bilingual Adventure here (one of the videos is now removed, linkrot on my own page!), and a recent interview with two of the creators is here in French.
