Hi, I'm Kevin Brown, a GSoC student this year. I live in Melbourne, Florida and am attending Brevard Community College. My previous projects include work on bots on the English Wikipedia for tagging of uncategorized pages and new page patrol cleanup.
Almost since the web’s inception, link rot has been a major problem. Web-based content comes and goes, sometimes within a matter of hours. This presents a major problem, both for users seeking to access this information and for Wikipedia's core content policy of verifiability. While Wikipedia policy does not require users to use web citations, it is by far the most popular form of citations, because they're easy for readers and editors to access.
To help solve this and ensure adherence to verifiability (WP:V), I plan to create an archival system over the summer, so users can access all external links even if they go down. This preemptive archival should effectively solve the problem of linkrot, as long as the source site allows caching of its content. The project aims to get something that "just works" without user input/request and to seamlessly integrate with existing page parsing and rendering. Such a system will allow users to focus on content creation, rather than the distracting technical aspects of archival.
I would appreciate your help with the project. Specifically, I'd appreciate it if communites could start discussing this on your project's local village pump, so that we can start developing consensus for deployment. Also, please feel free to email me or find me on IRC under the nick kevin_brown regarding any questions you may have.
I am currently drafting proposal and design documents and will be linking them as they become available. For now, please see a few relevant proposals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_External_links/Webcitebot... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Link_rot#Proposal_for_new_WikiPr... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/WebCiteBOT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Dead_Li...
(Thanks to Neil and Sumana for helping me write this.)
Best, Kevin