[WikiEN-l] Dealing with disappearing online sources

[Stephen Bain]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 4:13 AM, Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia at zog.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

See WP:DEADREF; see also [[Wikipedia:Dead external links]].

Linking to an archiving service, marking the dead link with the {{dead
link}} template, or even finding an alternative reference, are all
preferable options to simply removing the reference.

Convenience links (links to online copies of offline material) are
naturally a different kettle of fish; they are merely supplementary to
the offline reference.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com