Wikipedia:Link rot/URL change requests/Archives/2022/February

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Most of the links to www.ibm.com/developerworks/ are now broken, and many of them have not yet been archived. Jarble (talk) 16:47, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Will check the entire ibm.com domain for problems after Forbes is done. -- GreenC 17:00, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

So, I ran a test bed and found 100 of varieties of soft-soft-404s .. these are pages that are not the same as the original but are somewhat related, where it's difficult to tell if it's a useful landing page or not. IBM has some of the most complicated URl structures I have seen. The "/developerworks" is only 1 example. I have not had time to go through them. -- GreenC 02:49, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

toggle.sg is a Singapore only VOD service and had a brand refresh a couple of years ago. It had migrated to its new domain under the new brand, meWatch. As part of the migration, many of the old articles and some videos have vanished and being redirected to homepages of the other digital properties under its parent organisation's management. i.e. https://entertainment.toggle.sg/en/entertainment/localbuzz/article/star-awards-2019-nominees-revealed-11222220 redirects to 8days.sg. It has been two years and I think not many have been updating the links in the references, and it's time to just simply mark the entire domain and all subdomains as dead and let the citation bots do their work. – robertsky (talk) 01:20, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Robertsky:, done. It was able to find and save 17 links: example. The rest were archived (387); or {{dead link}} (43); or flip |url-status=live to |url-status=dead (6). GreenC 02:35, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

GreenC, thanks! – robertsky (talk) 02:37, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

User:66.102.87.40 said in an edit summary at Channel 37: "Wikipedia needs urgently to pull all external links to Clarke Ingram's "uhftelevision.com" in every affected page and replace them with the archive.org versions only, as the site is now cybersquatted as hardcore porn. Do. Not. Link. There." Do you think uhftelevision.com should be added to Wikipedia's blacklist? Mvcg66b3r (talk) 08:46, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Mvcg66b3r: Working.. -- GreenC 17:03, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Done 34 pages. Also blacklisted on IABot, it will propagate to other wikis. -- GreenC 17:33, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. It might also be worth checking dumonthistory.com and dumontnetwork.tv - which are related sites with the same original author. The content is likely harmless for these, but they are cybersquatted.

I also see one talk page is still linking uncyclopedia.ro - which is cybersquatted as porn. I remember at one point a third-party site was taking simple: content which linked there and repackaging it as an encyclopedia for kids. Years ago, so the worst of the links have been killed, but at this point we should not be linking there at all. 66.102.87.40 (talk) 19:12, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

I'll treat the two dumon sites as normal dead domains, they are unregistered according to who.is -- GreenC 19:51, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@GreenC: you can now replace uhftelevision.com with uhfhistory.com which is hosting all of the associated pages. The main page explains why the original domain disappeared: Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 03:58, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

We apologize for being "off the air" for so long, but our founder Clarke Ingram's health has declined to the point where he is now in a managed care facility and was unable to renew our hosting service. Due to ICANN regulations for expired domain names, we could not even attempt to reclaim the URL until late July, at which point we discovered that a "squatter" had taken over the original uhftelevision.com name (don't bother looking ... they made a porn site out of it, if you can believe that!). Our friend David Gleason at World Radio History subsequently offered the opportunity for this site (under a new domain name) to be part of his "family" from now on.

The DuMont pages will return at a later date on this domain, as well, but they have not done so yet.

@Sammi Brie: Done. Example. -- GreenC 05:00, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like I had those two domains reversed; dumonthistory-tv was the original, it moved to dumonthistory-com in 2009, then split in 2014 to dumontnetwork-com and uhftelevision-com. All except dumonthistory-com are cybersquatted to various degrees; the original .tv domain redirects to a supposed individual blog peddling an obscure weight-loss product in Polish, dumontnetwork-com is for sale for some inflated figure, uhftelevision-com is usurped as hardcore porn.

Whatever's online at uhfhistory.com and dumonthistory.com today looks to be recovered data.

At this point, I think we should remove all links to any of the three cybersquatted domains - if they haven't already been removed. Linking to cybersquatters only encourages more cybersquatters. Is there anything else that needs to be done to at least get the porn squatters blacklisted on all Wikimedia projects, instead of just en-Wikipedia? 66.102.87.40 (talk) 15:45, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

uhftelevision-com, dumontnetwork-com and dumonthistory-tv are expunged from enwiki entirely. They are set to 'permadead' in the IABot database so if the bot encounters them on other wikis they will be treated as dead links and archived, best we can do. -- GreenC 18:55, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

All articles on The Sunday Times have been moved to The Times. For example, a column that might be cited as https://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1545053.ece will go to a 404 page. Where the actual column has been moved to is https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-having-another-baby-but-i-cant-tell-you-what-it-will-look-like-v3brvqwjgzm. I don't think there's any way to automatically repair this link rot as the numbers at the end of articles seem to be random. It can easily be repaired manually because all the article titles are the same. ― TaltosKieronTalk 19:26, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Results

• Articles checked: 1,281
• Articles edited: 1,226
• New archive URL added: 1,243
• Existing |url-status=live changed to |url-status=dead: 107
• Add {{dead link}}: 62

User:Taltos, above is done. It's better to add archives in this case since the migrated URLs are behind a paywall. The 62 with {[tld|dead link}} could be manually moved, let me know if you want the list. -- GreenC 22:16, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia has several broken links to cnet.com, such as this one. These broken links should be easy to find, since they include "Page Not Found (404)" in the page title. Jarble (talk) 02:47, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

These kinds of find all links that might be dead and repair can be done, but it's work, semi-automated. It does a good job, finding soft-404s, and updating the IABot database and Enwiki. It takes time, particularly for large domains, manual work. Most domains have this problem to some degree. Each domain has its own custom requirements that have to be discovered and programmed for. -- GreenC 22:33, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I found many broken links to this site: can they be automatically repaired? Jarble (talk) 21:40, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

See the links here: many of these links have not yet been repaired. Jarble (talk) 21:46, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I found many links to this site that need to be archived. Jarble (talk) 21:59, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Many links to this site still need to be repaired. Jarble (talk) 22:06, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Museum Folkwang recently changed the links to their collection by adding an "eMP" directory. I fixed all the links I could find on the English wiki, but there are still broken links on other language wikis and sister projects.

• Old URL: http://collection-online.museum-folkwang.de/eMuseumPlus?*
• New URL: http://collection-online.museum-folkwang.de/eMP/eMuseumPlus?*

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Viriditas (talk • contribs)

I believe this was done by Viriditas manually since there are so few. -- GreenC 22:28, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, sorry about that. I need a sig bot to follow me around. Note, I only fixed the English wiki. I need a bot to fix the other languages and sister projects like Commons. Viriditas (talk) 22:34, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Unfortunately there is no bot working across wiki languages for this kind of work. It's difficult due to the variances of templates, languages and permissions. Can't safely search-replace static strings as it would break archive URLs, rather parse out cite templates, and ideally verify headers the new URL was in fact migrated, otherwise convert old url to an archive URL, or if none available add a {{dead link}}. All this is language-site specific, it's hard. GreenC 22:43, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

I’m sorry to hear that. I thought that one of the goals of Wikimedia Toolforge was to provide this service. How strange it is to hear that Wikimedia isn’t throwing serious money at this endeavor, as it would help to preserve the integrity, accuracy, and currency of the entire project as a whole. Viriditas (talk) 22:00, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the problem of maintaining URLs is pretty involved. I've been developing WaybackMedic for 6 years and it's still under constant change as new issue comes up that were never encountered before. If you want, I can provide a list of all URLs in all wikis. Some like dewiki have a bot community they might be able to fix it. Others might have a small number that can be done manually. -- GreenC 01:13, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Links to ComiXology are now broken due to Amazon's migration (see ComicBook.com & Gizmodo for more on it). For example, https://www.comixology.com/Womanthology-Space-4/digital-comic/34243 now redirects to https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/comics-store/home?_encoding=UTF8&merchant=&ref=nav_ya_signin&#nav-top instead of to https://www.amazon.com/Womanthology-Space-4-Devin-Grayson-ebook/dp/B00PZ6LYKO. Sariel Xilo (talk) 22:11, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Sariel Xilo, suggest we treat them all as dead links and add archive URLs. For example it becomes https://web.archive.org/web/20220210040220/https://www.comixology.com/Womanthology-Space-4/digital-comic/34243 -- GreenC 22:27, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense to me! I manually did that on one article before popping over here to flag the issue. Sariel Xilo (talk) 22:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

This got done yesterday. It edited about 197 pages and added about 310 new archive links. See any problems let me know. -- GreenC 00:41, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! I notified the comics project so if there's an issue I'm sure someone will flag it. Sariel Xilo (talk) 01:55, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

A user requested at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Astronomy#Moon_wiki_links_broken that all instances of external links to the Wikispaces subproject http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/ (links), which appears in the EL sections of several articles about lunar craters, be updated to the new location of this wiki at https://the-moon.us/ (links). More specifically, any instances of http://the-moon.wikispaces.com/$1 will become https://the-moon.us/wiki/$1. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:12, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

User:LaundryPizza03: Was able to convert all except 12 articles. Some of the links were not migrated to the new site. Wouldn't hurt if someone could go through the 12 manually to determine if anything further could be done. -- GreenC 18:34, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

This domain moved from HTTP to HTTPS in 2019, and all the external links will need to be updated. I've already handled all the instances on Conway's Game of Life. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:17, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

nvm, all the mainspace instance have already been handled, and the rest are automatically corrected by the browser. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:22, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

This domain belonged to Equity Media Holdings, a chain of underpowered UHF TV stations mostly affiliated to Univisión, UPN or other fourth-rated (or worse) networks. Equity went bust in the Great Recession in 2009. The stations were mostly sold to other broadcasters, including a fair amount of Daystar rubbish. They had no local origination capability, although Equity did generate individual feeds for each via satellite from Little Rock, Arkansas. The domain is now cybersquatted and redirecting to some sleazy adultery site with the usual sexual come-ons. This affects at least a dozen pages, mostly individual station histories for TV stations which Equity used to own. The link has been rotten for a little under a dozen years, with various detritus (such as ads or "this domain for sale" at various points) but, if it's been reduced to this, we really don't want to be linking there.

Too bad. It used to be possib;e to pick these up on a one-metre FTA dish almost anywhere in North America, but because the actual terrestrial signal was so thin on the ground, they did not survive. 66.102.87.40 (talk) 03:12, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Appreciate your in-depth knowledge of broadcasting topics! Able but barely to follow along ("local origination capability", "Daystar rubbish"). Emdaholdings.com .. I went ahead and usurpified 14 links in 13 articles. Had to delete 4 links as unverifiable, because the earliest archive available contain the spam site. The rest look OK. -- GreenC 04:31, 25 February 2022 (UTC)