Henning, If we're going to solve the problem of dead links, it needs to involve automation, at least for the heavy lifting. Obviously, if a human contributor can add a better source, that's great. But there are more dead links than people willing to replace them.
On English Wikipedia, there's Category:All articles with dead external links, and it contains more than 134,000 articles[1] -- and those are just the pages where somebody's added the Dead link template. There are a lot of missing references -- not just on English WP, but on all the projects -- and connecting those links to a live archive makes them useful again. For links that were moved, we may be able to collect and use that information -- I know that we're looking into what kind of metadata we can collect when a new link is added to the page. But I think finding alternative sources has to come from human contributors, and that's hard to scale. Danny PM, Community Tech [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottm...@gmx.net> wrote: > On 16.12.2015 21:12, Danny Horn wrote: > > > #1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine (111 support votes) > > I really hope, you don't follow that wish, as it is detrimental to the > quality of Wikipedia. > > Switching dead links to the archive is a move to a dead end, instead of > looking for > > a) the new correct URL, as many links were just moved. > b) alternative sources for the same fact. > > Ciao Henning > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
