[WikiEN-l] Dealing with disappearing online sources

[Matthew Brown]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:13 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?

IMO, the options are (in rough order of preference):

1. Find the referenced content elsewhere, e.g. archive.org (although
that's not the only possibility in some cases) and fix the links.
Sometimes it's simply that the site being referenced has moved stuff
about.
2. Find another reference that works for the information referenced.
3. Leave the reference in place but note that the links appear dead.
4. Remove the information that the references supported which can no
longer be verified, if you have doubts about its veracity.

I think that references should rarely if ever be removed; it removes
the record of where the information came from, even if it is a bad
source.

-Matt