fivethirtyeightindex.com indexes all 21,350 archived fivethirtyeight.com pages preserved by the Internet Archive, browsable by date and byline.
Key Takeaways
21,350 pages indexed spanning 2008-2025, covering every article before Disney/ABC deleted the site.
Browsable by year (2008-2025) and by 558 bylines; Nate Silver leads with 4,966 articles.
Top contributors include Neil Paine (1,428), Walt Hickey (1,210), Aaron Bycoffe (1,168), and Galen Druke (747).
Built by Ben Welsh, a data journalist at Reuters known for open-source data journalism tooling.
Hacker News Comment Review
Many interactive visualizations (gun deaths, P-hacking interactive) are broken in archived versions because dependent assets or server calls were not captured by the Wayback Machine crawl.
Commenters raised a practical preservation risk: whoever controls the fivethirtyeight.com domain could block Wayback Machine re-crawls via robots.txt, making this static index itself a critical redundancy.
Nate Silver sold FiveThirtyEight to ABC/Disney; the erasure of the archive arguably benefits his current independent site natesilver.net by recapturing former readers.
Notable Comments
@bombcar: warns domain owners could robots.txt archived URLs out of existence, making an external index more valuable than it first appears.
@simonw: highlights Ben Welsh’s open-source data journalism courses (first-python-notebook, first-web-scraper) as context for why he built this.
