Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links. Links to external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn out to be unavailable.
I don't know if there is any empirical data on this. I can provide an example from a page I help maintain. From what I see here I am pretty sure that sites are closing down or pages are being culled en masse for some reason: https://netpbm.sourceforge.net The ahove URL is the introductionary web page for the Netpbm software package. At the end of the page is a list of translations of the same into various languages. In early May this year I found out that out of 31 translations, 6 were not available: * Russian * Malay * Indonesian * German * Polish * Belarusian A recent survey (late November) showed that 4 more translations have disappeared: * Spanish * Urdu * Greek * Estonian Out of 31 translations 10 or 32.5% have disappeared. Only 21 remain. There must be an explanation for the rapid loss of sites and pages. Some sites hosting the translations look unrelated to system software. Netpbm is well-known and links in the official Netpbm document pages cause search engines to elevate the status of the liked pages and their links. In other words some people add the translations to their sites for SEO. One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at IT firms. If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much like to learn. Thank you for reading. _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
