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Wikipedia Community and Internet Archive Partner To Fix One Million Broken Links on Wikipedia (wikimedia.org)
More than one million formerly broken links in the English Wikipedia have been updated to archived versions from the Wayback Machine, thanks to a partnership between the Internet Archive, and volunteers from the Wikipedia community, and the Wikimedia Foundation. From a blog post: The Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteers from the Wikipedia community have now fixed more than one million broken outbound web links on English Wikipedia. This has been done by the Internet Archive's monitoring for all new, and edited, outbound links from English Wikipedia for three years and archiving them soon after changes are made to articles. This combined with the other web archiving projects, means that as pages on the Web become inaccessible, links to archived versions in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can take their place. This has now been done for the English Wikipedia and more than one million links are now pointing to preserved copies of missing web content. What do you do when good web links go bad? If you are a volunteer editor on Wikipedia, you start by writing software to examine every outbound link in English Wikipedia to make sure it is still available via the "live web." If, for whatever reason, it is no longer good (e.g. if it returns a "404" error code or "Page Not Found") you check to see if an archived copy of the page is available via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. If it is, you instruct your software to edit the Wikipedia page to point to the archived version, taking care to let users of the link know they will be visiting a version via the Wayback Machine.
Wikipedia, reverting knowledge since 2001.
Somebody wrote a perl script!
At the bottom of the
Preferably laser-etched into millions of quartz tablets and shot into space.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_215916.html
Zoo keeper mauled to death 'after defecating on tiger'
A young Chinese tiger keeper has been mauled to death after apparently trying to defecate on one of his big cats.
The 19-year-old appears to have climbed the railings of the Bengal tiger cage and pulled his trousers down.
Evidence at the scene of the death at the Jinan animal park included toilet paper, excrement and a trouser belt.
Zoo officials think Xu Xiaodong either slipped into the cage or was pulled in by one of the four angry tigers.
According to the South China Morning Post, the man told a co-worker he needed to go to the toilet but police were called when he failed to return.
They found his body lying on the ground surrounded by tigers. The teenager had reportedly been bitten in the neck and was covered in blood.
Police believe Xu climbed the wall of a partially constructed building used to raise the tigers to relieve himself. They said the smell probably caused the tigers to pounce.
You can see more stories about tigers and zoos on Ananova,
or read our Animal attacks file.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I have found many cases on Wikipedia where the links are broken but the correct content exists at a different URL. This auto-archive system would bypass that and perhaps prevent ever recognizing that the link target still exists. This is especially an issue for links to corporate and government pages where someone periodically gets the bright idea to reshuffle the web site's organization and doesn't put in permanent redirects.
Great job, now if only Wikipedia could deal with the blatant bias and astroturfing of its upper editing class it would be back to its 2005 status.
Ever since I first saw the inner workings of Wikipedia I have become more and more enamored with the old style of expert-based (and accountable) encyclopaedias rather than the internet-warrior crowdsourced one. People tend to write very differently when their professional reputation is on the line.
I wish they would fix links when someone changes the location of content within wikipedia. What happens is that someone believes they have found a better spot for some content and move it there (for example, maybe there's more information about something and it becomes a page of it's own instead of a paragraph on some other page). However the person that moves it doesn't look for everything that links to where the original content was and updates the links.
I was doing some research on colours for a developer tool earlier this year and came across problem a number of times. It's extremely frustrating, especially when you contact the person to ask about the move (it wasn't as simple as my example above) and they rip your head off for asking.
Because the Internet Archive applies robots.txt rules retroactively.
Please stop linking to or even mentioning Wikipedia. Starting now. See how good it feels to bask in a flow of information free of ass hat manipulation!
What makes you think other information sources - encyclopedias, news outlets, books, etc. - aren't subject to "ass hat manipulation"?
At least with Wikipedia the information gets a chance to get out (and into the page history) before some ass hat gatekeeper decides to shut it down or distort it beyond recognition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way