Points of Articulation
The Death of Reference
We currently have a huge problem in the toy collecting hobby.
When the internet started, every site was a fan site: there were no corporately-controlled databases of information, it was just passionate people sharing what they were passionate about. And when nerds get their special interest activated, they can be exhaustively complete - that's a good thing, in this case, because it led to the creation of several incredibly useful reference sites that covered the history of the hobby, generally focussing on a specific brand.
The problem is, being fan-run endeavors, eventually people move on and things stop getting attention. We've sad before that it's always sad when a site that used to be a preeminent database for release info on toys just... stops? "Yes, we've got detailed entries on everything you'd ever want to know. Up to 2018, 2019." YoJoe.com and RebelScum.com are the most obvious examples off the top of my head: YoJoe has meticulous records of every GI Joe figure produced from 1982 on up... but the last time their site was updated was 2017, and these days it will have to be reloaded like a dozen times before anything will actually load. RebelScum can show you clear photos of everything from the first releases in 1977, but pretends no toys have been released since before Covid.
As a review site that cares about making sure the things we say are accurate, reference sites like these are incredibly important, so to have them functionally cease to exist really sucks. It's not just those two, either: my bookmarks used to be full of helpful links where I could double-check my facts, and now so many of them are just gone.
The first site I can remember losing was MarvelToys.net, which went all the way back to the Mattel Secret Wars days, allowed you to search by year, by character, by theme, by line, by team, and had everything cross-linked and listed to make navigating easier. They had pictures of most of the releases, including lists and standalone shots of the accessories, as well as a brief description of the figure, its reused parts, and any action features it may have had. Sometimes the site had mistakes (getting the year of release wrong, for example), but it was a great starting point for looking things up. And then one day it was gone.
Another similar loss was MarvelLegends.net, which focused on 6" figures instead of trying to cover everything. We liked that one because it would list sculptor information on the older Legends, which was helpful. It, too, petered out, its "Adding soon!" sidebar growing ever longer with no movement, and then eventually one day just stopped loading.
These are just a few examples, based specificxally on toys. Want a technical list of all Iron Man's armors, their specs, and when they first appeared? Gone. Want every major DC character, credits for who created them, and a shot of their first appearance? Gone. The on-panel appearance of every Walking Dead zombie that was turned into a toy? Gone. A breakdown of GI Joe characters by number of lines spoken in the cartoon? Gone. Name for all the parts of a suit of armor? Gone. Some of this stuff can be found on fan wikis, but not as reliably, and not to the same extent. And there are still sites that continue doing their job as best they're able (love ya, Minimate Database!), but there are fewer of them all the time.
This isn't a new problem, and these are thoughts I've been mulling over for a while now. But it's one that's really hit home with the recent DDoS attack against the Internet Archive. These sites may be gone, but I still keep my bookmarks - I just use the Wayback Machine to go get the information I need from them. But on October 9, hackers targeted Archive.org, taking the site offline and meaning access to all that information was now lost.
The Internet Archive was already one of the most important sites in existence, and it became even moreso earlier this year when Google made the dumbass decision to no longer cache pages. The Wayback Machine was great for a historical view of a page, but it took time to get there: Google Cache would have a copy available to read almost as soon as it was found, which was a helpful stopgap. But somebody needed to prove they'd led a project, so Google ended that, and thus when the Archive crashed a few months later, there were now no reliable ways to see content that was offline. Great timing, idiots!
There's no easy solution to the death of online reference material. When you're expecting fans to not only do the work for free, but also foot the bill for hosting the site and obtaining the figures, that's too much. Until somebody comes up with something, we're doomed to lose these resources one after another.
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