On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org wrote:
The other day I noticed an editor replacing multiple references to a
website
that has disappeared with {{fact}}, in different articles. The other day I noticed an editor removing a number of references to a website, with a "this site is gone" edit summary. The site has indeed left the building, so to speak, but I'm not sure what the rule is here.
Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is (with a note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or replace the links with archive.org links?
In these particular instances the links were replaced by {{fact}}, which is--to my mind--the worst of all options: it makes it look as if there
never
were proper sources for the statement, or actually worse: the "citation needed" make it look as if the statements are somehow controversial. Not
to
mention that they now run the risk of being deleted.
(The issue that made me think about this is clouded by the fact that the editor effectively removing the sources deems the originally referenced
site
untrustworthy, but that's beside the larger point, really.)
Michel Vuijlsteke
Removing citations due to broken links is bad practice and we even have a user warning about it: {{subst:uw-deadlink}}
Of course citations that are just a bare URL makes things harder to fix, that's why I like to use the {{linkrot}} template on articles without properly formatted citations.
-- Elias Friedman A.S., EMT-P ⚕ elipongo@gmail.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elipongo