The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down. You can be trained as an archivist. You can get a Masters and a PhD in archival pr

The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down. You can be trained as an archivist. You can get a Masters and a PhD in archival practice. There are industry-standard procedures and codes of ethics. There's a very specific understanding of what is important to save, how to save it, and how to document its context and its provenance. That's why the Internet Archive requires a certain fidelity of capture (WARCs) that a screenshot service or a citation tool don't provide. That's also why they are legally a library. Libraries have particular copyright exemptions for preservation. A typical person doesn't. But you generally have the right to make backups for your own use, and so you can also donate those backups. It's like if you were a famous person, and you bought a newspaper and a book, and when you died your personal effects were donated to your alma mater who put on a big exhibit of your life and times, that newspaper (your backup of the original that lives in the hard drives of the publisher) and that book (your backup of the original that some author wrote) are there, too. No-one's conferring any rights to the content; the publisher still owns the newspaper, and the author still owns the book, but that was your copy that is now available for everyone to see.