We recently discussed the decision by Disney, owners of the defunct politics and sports analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, to wipe the venerable website’s entire catalogue. Although this action came as a surprise, it appears it was not too late for journalist and programmer Ben Welsh to save all of its content. He managed to create fivethirtyeightindex, which contains:
- Links to all of their articles (from existing snapshots on the Wayback machine)
- All supporting datasets (pulled from GitHub and now uploaded to the Internet Archive)
- All podcasts (presumably pulled from their original host and now uploaded to the Internet Archive)
I also thought to grab a copy of their GitHub repositories after noticing they were still up, but I held off on uploading them to the Internet Archive, as I was unsure if Disney was going to take action to remove the datasets from GitHub (it appears they have not).
I am glad someone has done the work of preserving and indexing this invaluable trove of data journalism.
PS. Nate Silver wrote more about the erasure of FiveThirtyEight on his new site, The Silver Bulletin.
Hat tip to ChocMontePy on Hacker News.