I see incredible value in IA collection of books, videos and software. OTOH I'm puzzled by lack of organization.
Take for example this newer document: https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-5695071 The document has horrible name and useless tags, and the content seems to be only section 2 of some SW manual. How would I ever hope to find it if I needed that exact document?
Obviously such huge archive cannot be categorized and annotated by small team, so it would make sense to crowdsource the labeling process. Yet, as registered user I can only flag the item, or write a review. Why doesn't IA let users label content and build their own curated collections of items?
Commented above before I saw yours. I agree, and wonder further if archive.org could play host instead to any number of spinoff sites that try to better organize/present the data (or a subset of the data) on archive.org.
It would be nice if there was a good search engine for the wayback engine. Browsing in the past is pretty cumbersome right now, you need to know the URLs or at least websites that used to have the information you want.
To be fair the linked document was uploaded just today to a collection that seems be considered a "waystation" collection so probably the document will be moved later to a permanent collection.
And I think they have bots that process the uploaded documents to do OCR and create previews.
Even for quite mature documents, allowing users to curate them would benefit everyone.
This mature archived item https://archive.org/details/whattodrawhowtod00lutz/ is well described, but it is missing tags and it's not part of any relevant collection that would help us discover other similar books.
I agree that getting more people involved (by crowdsourcing or other ways) will be beneficial to the project. But it'll depend on how the effort will be organized.
My experience with the website is that the original uploader can edit some part of the "metadata" (not all) of the uploaded document like title, description, topics/tags ..., but they can't move it to a different collection (initially the document is uploaded the "community" collection).
If they want to put it in a different collection they have to contact archive.org's staff.
Sometimes the staff notice the new files and move them to the correct collection or even create a new one for them (the latter case happened to me).
Take for example this newer document: https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-5695071 The document has horrible name and useless tags, and the content seems to be only section 2 of some SW manual. How would I ever hope to find it if I needed that exact document?
Obviously such huge archive cannot be categorized and annotated by small team, so it would make sense to crowdsource the labeling process. Yet, as registered user I can only flag the item, or write a review. Why doesn't IA let users label content and build their own curated collections of items?