Most of the HighBeam subpages redirect here, because more people are watching this page. If you're posting a question about one of those pages, please let everyone know which one you're talking about. If you are looking for material for a specific article from HighBeam, the best place to post a request is at WP:RX
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]
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. - JuneGloom07Talk20:13, 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.Rainthe 110:05, 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]
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]
@Samwalton9 (WMF): Perhaps if they provided Cyberpower678 with access he can crawl all the articles. Another solution could be to ask for a torrent of all the content so that we can at least have it on hand somewhere. Also, are they going to be moving the content to Questia? That would be the simplest solution (at our end). Anarchyte (talk | work)08:53, 26 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]
These IA archives, are they of the paywalled or full versions of the articles? I've often seen HighBeam citations not give the original publication in the ref, so will be very hard to retain those citations once HB goes down without that metadata. czar16:09, 6 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Czar: Just the paywalled part, generally including an abstract or the first paragraph or two. This Highbeam link, for example, would be archived like this. Unfortunately there's just no legal way IA would have been able to archive the full text of these sources. As far as I understand, all the content should now, or soon, be available via Questia, if you need the full text. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:29, 6 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@GreenC: All the IA-archived URLs will be processed by InternetArchiveBot over time - I haven't had the time to work on the direct URL replacement, but if you've got a tool that would be fantastic. The main holdup I've had in starting to work on this is parsing the citations so that references to HighBeam in the citation information would be replaced with Questia. Anyway, the data file can be found here if you want to work on it :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:01, 4 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk, I can work on enwiki and I will contact someone for dewiki. The others.. bot flags and language differences. Could post a URL move request in their botreq forums. Someone might do it manually, with AWB or with an existing bot. -- GreenC16:14, 4 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Samwalton9 (WMF): this has been completed on Enwiki and I believe also for Dewiki. It would be safe for IABot to mark anything remaining as dead and add archives. My bot can do that if needed, but IABot is the right/easier tool for the job. -- GreenC02:01, 8 January 2019 (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? —Bruce1eetalk15:34, 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. -- GreenC15:54, 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. -- GreenC16:13, 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. -- GreenC17:18, 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. —Bruce1eetalk09:48, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
