Did we just lose thousands of sources?

Question

Over the weekend it appears about 10,000 96X suggestions were cleaned with little investigation. A tool such as Who Is can tell you what is happening with a domain, is it subscription only, what is it about, who hosted it, etc.  The couple of profiles on my watchlist that were found with these suggestions just had the broken link deleted. I was able to locate the host and have emailed them regarding what I had found on their domain as a source and have requested where I might find what I had previously linked to on that domain.  I believe the conundrum deals with SEO preferences v. weblink sources.  How many folks are going to look through changes tabs to find these now deleted sources that currently may have a domain issue? Is there a better way such as only removing the http, moving them to a comment box, using hide tags, or perhaps something else?

Comments

I just replace http / https with words "old link" because that was the source of the information at the time it was entered.

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Will a previously sourced profile now be crowned with an unsourced! So sort of nudging the error along a bit but now a step more difficult to sort out. It's a bit like unsourced badges on all the outer edges of the tree where a quick glance shows that their existence is known by the child's baptism source and probably nothing else will ever be found.

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I don't think so. A source was provided. I don't see anything about sources on WikiTree that would indicate a requirement of being a valid link forever.

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Louis, you said you change a link to have https, but I am hoping that you verified the new formatted link works.  I have found very few links that were tagged as a problem that needed only that change.

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Nope I said  http / https meaning http or https

Answer 1

Broken Links should not be removed.  It is better to add a comment to state that it didn't work as of the date being checked.  Wayback Machine should be checked to see if the url has been checked previously and can be retrieved.  When that is done, then the link can be changed to the Wayback Machine url where the page works, including a note that it was found on that site. 

I agree that many people won't know that the sources were removed.  During the Clean a Thon, the majority of people were working on the Location suggestions, I think, and not on the bad links suggestions. I am sure that some were working on them, but hopefully, most did not just remove the bad links.

Comments

This is not an issue just because of the Clean a thon timing.  People have been working on these 'links' suggestions since they started appearing on everyone's Suggestions, so no one should be blaming the recent Thon for all missing links.

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No blame was intended... I was surprised to find the popularity of these challenging suggestions during the thon being 16th, 19th, 20th, 49th, and 77th, out of the 256 different suggestions worked on.

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Note: Way back machine often does not find the latest updates with corrections. I have had numerous websites on Rootsweb that got hacked on ancestry and were offline for over a year. When they came back on ancestry many of the pages were missing and links didn't work. I used way back machine but discovered many corrections and additions i made were not there as they were updated after the last date way back machine saved.

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Sometimes if a link is gone and not in archive.org, you may be able to search it up on google and then click the 3 dots near the entry that is gone and look for the "cached" page option. Once you can see the cached version, you can print to pdf and then upload the pdf to replace the bad link.

Answer 2

The Flying Dutchmen team updated about 1700 URLs fixing 96x "suggestions", thus accounting for some 17% of the total 96x number.

I said updated because I am quite confident that that was what was done: replacing outdated URLs to original, official BMD records in Dutch Archive institutions by the currently valid ones. URLs changed by Archives for technical reasons, usually the move to implement permalinks to their records.

Comments

Jan, thanks to you and Astrid, I did update some old profiles of Dutchjews, who had a dead link.

Removing those links is not a solution.

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Great Herman,thank you for updating instead of removing!

Answer 3

If you are going to remove them use 

ADD--- "Removed link and link url "

in the Explain your changes: 

and it shows up easy in the tracked changes list without having to open any

This should be mandatory if links are removed 

also a comment helps--broken link-no sources --broken link- tree only -documentation added to profile etc

Comments

Unfortunately too many people don't put any comments when they make changes to profiles, as seen by looking at many of the top contributors for the Clean A Thon.  The work goes faster when you have to add a comment that explains what was done instead of no comment or using the 'Formatting' comment.

I would still prefer to not use the link removed from the biography so people don't have to check Change Log. Reviewing some of the 96x Changes that were made this past weekend, most had the url revised, not removed, but there were a lot of the url Suggestions updated earlier in the week, based on the overall count differences.

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If I had my way --We would not allow use of links to pedigrees and trees, but add the documented sources used on them instead then cite the source without the url. That would help prevent future errors and need for corrections.

I waste so much time checking out links that have nothing to add to the profile of documentation and even worse sometimes just undocumented errors. For me it feels like a complete waste of time following them to see what they contain, time that I could use finding documentation instead. 

Answer 4

I have deleted 500+ links that only stated "Media: Internet http://www.genlias.nl/en/page0.jsp": a search-page on a site that has been replaced by wiewaswie.nl. I only mentioned the "Removed broken link" as an explanation of the change. In effect, the profiles were/are unsourced. Looking for real sources will take some time, so I'll keep the list for the next Source-a-thon.