On 27 January 2014 00:17, Kevin Gorman kgorman@gmail.com wrote:
Funny you ask... there are not currently any solid ones afaik, but I've been talking with the Internet Archive about building out a bot and trying to achieve community consensus on ENWP to autoreplace deadlinks with archive.org ones. The IA has been crawling all new external links on all Wikimedia projects at least once every couple of hours for months, and has a strong interest in killing off literally all of our dead links. Unless something falls through, I should be bringing a more detailed plan up within maybe five or six weeks.
Yes, I knew you were cooking up something :-) I was just surprised it wasn't the sort of task that people had already automated, or written a nice toolserver bot for, or something.
The ones that use {{cite web}} and variants are pretty simple: you just whack in archiveurl= and archivedate= (preferably as close as possible to any cited accessdate=) ... then double-check by eye, of course. It just gets very tedious and error-prone doing it by hand, cut'n'pasting URLs into the middle of the computer guacamole we lovingly euphemise as "wikitext". VE isn't a much happier method.
- d.