I would like to draw Wikimedians' attention to the problem of expiring .yu top level domain.

As is known, .yu top level domain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu ) is being replaced with .rs and .me TLDs. This means that all web pages under .yu domain will stop working, including all 46102 that are linked from various Wikimedia projects: some will stop as soon as March, while all will stop in October. This further means that readers of Wikimedia projects will not be able to access information that is now available to them, either if a domain is used as an external link or if it is used as an article reference. Especially the latter is very important since, with massive link loss, a large number of references could no longer be evaluated by the readers and editors.

To solve this problem, I have made a statistics of .yu domain use on Wikimedia projects ( http://toolserver.org/~nikola/yustats.tar.bz2 ) and, with its help, replaced at least the most common links on Serbian Wikipedia with their appropriate equivalents.

However, given that I am not able to do the same on other projects, I would like to attract attention of people who are willing to help and can do necessary botwork to fix as many soon-to-be broken links as possible. Please reply if you can help in any way or have any other advice. If you are a bot operator, you can do it easily with the standard pywikipediabot. Here is a sample command I used:

python replace.py -weblink:webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu "webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu" "webrzs.stat.gov.rs"

==The domains== This is a list of domains that are already search/replaced on Serbian Wikipedia. This list includes most of the most common domains and covered perhaps a quarter of all links (even while not counting webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu that was included via a few templates).

{| !From!To |- ||webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu||webrzs.stat.gov.rs |- ||www.rastko.org.yu||www.rastko.org.rs |- ||www.reprezentacija.co.yu||www.reprezentacija.rs |- ||www.blic.co.yu||www.blic.co.rs |- ||www.beograd.org.yu||www.beograd.org.rs |- ||arhiva.glas-javnosti.co.yu||arhiva.glas-javnosti.rs |- ||www.srpsko-nasledje.co.yu||www.srpsko-nasledje.co.rs |- ||www.dnevnik.co.yu||www.dnevnik.rs |- ||www.srbija.sr.gov.yu||www.srbija.gov.rs |- ||www.kurir-info.co.yu/Arhiva||arhiva.kurir-info.rs/Arhiva |- ||www.kurir-info.co.yu/arhiva||arhiva.kurir-info.rs/arhiva |- ||www.kurir-info.co.yu||www.kurir-info.rs |- ||arhiva.kurir-info.co.yu||arhiva.kurir-info.rs |- ||www.prvaliga.co.yu||www.prvaliga.rs |- ||www.mitropolija.cg.yu||www.mitropolija.me |- ||www.spc.yu/sr||www.spc.rs/sr |- ||www.sk.co.yu||www.sk.co.rs |- ||www.ekoforum.org.yu||www.ekoforum.org |- ||www.svevlad.org.yu||www.svevlad.org.rs |- ||www.posta.co.yu||www.posta.rs |- ||www.glas-javnosti.co.yu||www.glas-javnosti.rs |- ||www.fscg.cg.yu||www.fscg.co.me |- ||ww1.rts.co.yu/euro||ww1.rts.co.rs/euro |}