We will expand our efforts to check
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 9:50 am
We learned that the issue of “link rot” (when once-good links return a 404, 500 or other complete failure) is only part of the problem, and that “content drift” (when the content related to a URL changes over time) is also a concern. In fact, “content drift” may be a bigger problem for reliably using external resources because there is no way for the user to know the content they are looking at is not the same as the editor had originally intended.
We learned that by working in collaboration with staff members of the Wikimedia Foundation, volunteers from the Wikipedia communities, paid contractors and the archived resources whatsapp lead of the Wayback Machine and other web archives, we can have a material impact on the quality and reliability of Wikipedia sites and in so doing support our mission of “helping to make the web more useful and reliable”.
What is next? and edit more Wikipedia sites and increase the speed which we scan those sites and fix broken links.
We will improve our processes to archive externally referenced resources by taking advantage of the Wikimedia Foundation’s new “EventStreams” web service.
We will explore how we might expand our link checking and fixing efforts to other media and formats, including more web pages, digital books and academic papers.
We will investigate and experiment with methods to support authors and editors use of archived resources (e.g. using Wayback Machine links in place of live-web links).
We will continue to work with the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikipedia communities world-wide, to advance tools and services to promote and support the use of persistently available and reliable links to externally referenced resources.
We learned that by working in collaboration with staff members of the Wikimedia Foundation, volunteers from the Wikipedia communities, paid contractors and the archived resources whatsapp lead of the Wayback Machine and other web archives, we can have a material impact on the quality and reliability of Wikipedia sites and in so doing support our mission of “helping to make the web more useful and reliable”.
What is next? and edit more Wikipedia sites and increase the speed which we scan those sites and fix broken links.
We will improve our processes to archive externally referenced resources by taking advantage of the Wikimedia Foundation’s new “EventStreams” web service.
We will explore how we might expand our link checking and fixing efforts to other media and formats, including more web pages, digital books and academic papers.
We will investigate and experiment with methods to support authors and editors use of archived resources (e.g. using Wayback Machine links in place of live-web links).
We will continue to work with the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikipedia communities world-wide, to advance tools and services to promote and support the use of persistently available and reliable links to externally referenced resources.