Quantifying Orphaned Annotations in Hypothes.is

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the prevalence of orphaned annotations in Hypothes.is, revealing that a significant portion of annotations are lost or at risk due to web page changes and limited archiving, highlighting the need for better archiving practices.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantification of orphaned annotations in Hypothes.is and emphasizes the importance of archiving web pages at annotation creation.

Findings

22% of annotations are no longer attachable to live pages

Only 12% of orphaned annotations can be recovered via web archives

53% of attached annotations risk becoming orphans due to page changes

Abstract

Web annotation has been receiving increased attention recently with the organization of the Open Annotation Collaboration and new tools for open annotation, such as Hypothes.is. We investigate the prevalence of orphaned annotations, where neither the live Web page nor an archived copy of the Web page contains the text that had previously been annotated in the Hypothes.is annotation system (containing 20,953 highlighted text annotations). We found that about 22% of highlighted text annotations can no longer be attached to their live Web pages. Unfortunately, only about 12% of these annotations can be reattached using the holdings of current public web archives, leaving the remaining 88% of these annotations orphaned. For those annotations that are still attached, 53% are in danger of becoming orphans if the live Web page changes. This points to the need for archiving the target of an annotation at the time the annotation is created.