Henning,
If we're going to solve the problem of dead links, it needs to involve automation, at least for the heavy lifting. Obviously, if a human contributor can add a better source, that's great. But there are more dead links than people willing to replace them.
On English Wikipedia, there's Category:All articles with dead external links, and it contains more than 134,000 articles[1] -- and those are just the pages where somebody's added the Dead link template. There are a lot of missing references -- not just on English WP, but on all the projects -- and connecting those links to a live archive makes them useful again.
For links that were moved, we may be able to collect and use that information -- I know that we're looking into what kind of metadata we can collect when a new link is added to the page. But I think finding alternative sources has to come from human contributors, and that's hard to scale.
Danny PM, Community Tech
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links
On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
On 16.12.2015 21:12, Danny Horn wrote:
#1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine (111 support votes)
I really hope, you don't follow that wish, as it is detrimental to the quality of Wikipedia.
Switching dead links to the archive is a move to a dead end, instead of looking for
a) the new correct URL, as many links were just moved. b) alternative sources for the same fact.
Ciao Henning
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