Hi
I am not too sure if my experience counts here, but yes I agree there
are a fair number of broken links out there.
I have maintained my own website / blog for a number of years. For a
long time this ran on Wordpress, until the person who maintained the
hosting was no longer able to carry on. The website was therefore
lost. I moved to writefreely which uses (personaljournal.ca)
In both cases I could post links to posts on forums, etc, as part of the
post, clearly if the linked post was on word press the link would
fail. I think other would link to my posts too.
With my current blog, I post about local football team training, I am
starting to try and purge old posts. I feel there is no point in
keeping an old post that is just there to remind people of a training
session 2 or 3 weeks ago, let alone months. So I just delete the post.
On a similar note, If I share an update say a debian point release for
10.x why keep this beyond the life of that OS.
I did set up a team blog on paper.wf (which again is hosted on
writefreely. however this site also stopped working, so my site was lost.
If there is a protocol on what we are meant to do, I am not aware of it
But yeah it does seem to be a problem.
If a website is commercial, then that company has the funds to keep an
archive for example, projects, individuals do not always have the
funds, so if funds run low, then projects go if it means that person
can pay for food, rent, clothing etc.
Perhaps this is why archive sites are important.
It is difficult, I guess in terms of wikipedia posts, someone has to
maintain the articles.
Paul
On 04/12/2023 03:53, Akira Urushibata wrote:
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.
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