Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Nate the Great]

So how come the Wayback Machine can keep track of this stuff?

To change direction...

If there was one set of homonyms that you could just snap your fingers and POOF they'd be represented by different words? Its and it's? Their and there? Heck, "bank" is a financial institution, an array of terminals, the area of land on one side of a body of water, etc.

Would it be neat or worthwhile if the tropics could get one decent snowfall a year, with the northern latitudes getting one decent hot summer day a year in return (a la The Year Without A Santa Claus)?

Would it be easier to get ten random people to agree on pizza toppings or ice cream sundaes?

Okay, this is a BIG one: how come we can't get pronounciation guides (whether print or online) that actually consists of letters and phrases that we can understand? To whit: I go to the page for Wikipedia itself and see:
"Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwiːkiˈpiːdiə/, /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ or /ˌwiːkiˈpeɪdiə/)"
Putting aside the fact that a site shouldn't have four official pronounciations for its own name, what does "wɪkɨˈpiːdiə" sound like? I don't know. What's wrong with phonetic pronounciation guides? "wih-kee-pee-dee-ah." You can pronounce that, right? Oh, I'm sure Professor Henry Higgins knows exactly what each symbol means, but I don't have a clue.