Category talk:Articles with formerly dead external links

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Wrh2 in topic A note on false positives

Statistics

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As of 13 August 2018

Articles with dead links by type and status in Category:Articles with formerly dead external links
Type/Status
Matrix
Outline Usable Guide Star Unranked Total (line)
District 4 42 0 0 46
City 355 586 7 0 948
Airport 1 0 0 0 1
Park 21 6 0 0 27
Dive guide 0 1 0 0 1
Region 63 25 0 0 1 89
Country 7 1 0 0 8
Itinerary 1 2 0 0 3
Travel topic 8 8 0 0 16
Total 460 671 7 0 1 1140
Articles with dead links by continent and status in Category:Articles with formerly dead external links
Type/Status
Matrix
Outline Usable Guide Star Unranked Total (line)
Africa 25 25 0 0 50
Antarctica 0 0 0 0 0
Asia 78 142 0 0 220
Europe 132 198 3 0 344
North America 202 256 3 0 461
Oceania 0 0 0 0 0
South America 16 40 1 0 57

Collaboration of the month - April 2018

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Swept in from the pub

We have a few hundred Articles with formerly dead external links. These are links that previously had domain or page not found but are now showing a valid web page. Many of these are referencing other, incorrect, businesses. Some are just incorrectly tagged. Would be good to have a concerted effort to fix these links or removed listings that no-longer exist. --Traveler100 (talk) 08:09, 3 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

If you've not done this before, then there are instructions at the top of the category page. Alternatively, look in the wikitext for a dead link template with two months: {{dead link|Month 2017|Another 2017}} and check the marked URL. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 4 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Here are a couple of examples were the web address exists but have been taken over by tourist site pages, Westfield MA , Truro MA. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:51, 5 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Half way through. --Traveler100 (talk) 06:43, 15 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
A few contributors have made a serious impact on quality of articles reducing pages with link issues from 812 to 174 in one month. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:36, 1 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

A note on false positives

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As the bot is currently re-running I'm seeing a number of links being marked as "previously dead" that, when you click on them, still show up as being obviously dead in a browser. In the majority of cases I've looked at, what is actually happening is that the link itself is usually an http link. When the bot hits that link, the site in question appears to have a global rule set to redirect all http links to the https equivalent. The "page has been moved" (301 redirect) response from the site is interpreted by the bot as a successful response since it does not attempt a second request to the provided https target. In other words:

  1. Bot queries link of the form http://www.example.com/some_page.htm
  2. The site in question returns a response indicating that the page in question has moved to https://www.example.com/some_page.htm. At this point the bot treats the link as again being alive since it is now getting a response that it has been coded to treat as a success.
  3. However, if you actually go to https://www.example.com/some_page.htm the page does not exist.

At some point in the future I may update the bot to handle this edge case, but for now this explanation hopefully provides some insight as to why the bot is suddenly tagging links as "previously dead" when they are clearly still dead in a browser. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:43, 1 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

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