On 29.12.2015 03:40, Pete Forsyth wrote:
This is not an "either/or" situation. At least in the past, when I have manually added Wayback Machine links (or seen them added by bots), they do not *replace* dead links, they merely complement them. The English Wikipedia templates include two separate parameters for "url" and "archiveurl".
That's true only for a) external links that use templates and b) it assumes that people will be motivated to check for alternatives to archive links despite their immediate need for information seems to be satisfied by the archive link.
Maybe I'm not typical in this, but I prefer a dead link over a link to the archive that was set by a bot without checking for a live link anytime.
Ciao Henning