[WikiEN-l] Dealing with disappearing online sources

[Elias Friedman]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia at 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 at gmail.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elipongo