1

The WikiHow Projects account often removes dead links from articles. However, this seems like a problem, because then you’re left with a claim that doesn’t have a source to back it up. This seems especially troublesome considering wikiHow’s efforts to improve its standing as a reliable source.

Wikipedia has a whole essay on preventing and dealing with link rot ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot ), and I’m wondering whether there have been discussions about this on wikiHow. Especially for topics that really require sources (ones that are controversial, legal, medical, etc. in nature), removing the link seems worse than just letting it sit there, even if it’s dead.

2

You bring up an excellent point on this. I manage the project to remove the broken links. We do this because removing broken links creates a bad user experience and is believed by many SEO experts to be a negative ranking signal in Google. I understand that Wikipedia discourages removal of links like this, but Wikipedia is a bit of an exception to many SEO rules, and I think it’s good practice for us to keep removing the links. However, we can also couple this with a review to see where we should be adding links back in.

3

@Zodi , I was wondering this as well. As much as dead links are usually just taking up space, it’s no better having unsourced content, especially, as you said, for topics that could easily be disputed without a reputable source. Therefore (and my idea here is pretty darn far-fetched), maybe creating a new “Link Replacement” tool that for every broken link that WikiHow Projects removes, or even Seymour Edits when they remove bad sources, the information could be fact-checked or changed if needed, based on a new source. Just an idea though!

4

I was thinking maybe a link replacement bot be set up, but we don’t want to go overboard with automating everything… xD

5

Darn the SEO overlords!:stuck_out_tongue:

I’m interested to knowwhether it’s an option to replace dead links with their archived version from the Wayback Machine. I know Wikipedia has multiple bots to aid in combating link rot, but I’m not sure how applicable that can be on wikiHow.

6

Yes, considering not many of the “nuts and bolts” (as I like to call them) of Wikipedia work on wikiHow, at least from my experience.

7

We might not have an easy automated solution, but either adding Wayback machine links or updating links where appropriate would be great solutions. Is this something that people would be interested in trying? I’m happy to share tracking sheets.

9

Here’s a tracking sheet of links removed since mid-March. There are a lot of pages here, and not every link will need to be restored, but I’d be really interested in knowing how the process goes after you’ve tried a few:slight_smile:

11

Maybe, just maybe… we get an Internet Archive bot…

In the meantime, we can probably just manually add Internet Archive links, as they kind of do the same thing…

12

@CPenguin17 Your approach seems like a good one. Yes, we would prefer to have non-archive links for sources. And you can also flag in the “note” column articles where the accuracy of the information seems suspect. We can review those to see if the article needs to be revised.