Is anyone studying the rate at which external links become unavailable on Wikipedia projects?
I just did a quick tally and less than 40% of the external links cited in the introductions of L1-vital enwiki health and social science articles I sampled were good, and that's only counting those which didn't already have a {{dead link}} tag.
I thought that the bots were doing a better job of replacing dead links with archive copies than they apparently are. Do we need to fund this as an official effort?