  The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web
has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration
rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive
the fast-disappearing web content for long-term use. As web technologies
evolve, established web archiving techniques face challenges. This paper
focuses on the potential impact of the relaxed consistency web design on
crawler driven web archiving. Relaxed consistent websites may disseminate,
albeit ephemerally, inaccurate and even contradictory information. If captured
and preserved in the web archives as historical records, such information will
degrade the overall archival quality. To assess the extent of such quality
degradation, we build a simplified feed-following application and simulate its
operation with synthetic workloads. The results indicate that a non-trivial
portion of a relaxed consistency web archive may contain observable
inconsistency, and the inconsistency window may extend significantly longer
than that observed at the data store. We discuss the nature of such quality
degradation and propose a few possible remedies.
