Talk:South African couple killed after being hit by train while having sex

Latest comment: 6 years ago by Pi zero in topic Dead links
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Out of the three sources, only the middle one works. Should the other ones be deleted... or what? Leaderboard (talk) 16:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Leaderboard: The Sources section of an article is a permanent record of where the information was drawn from, so we don't delete them; however, we do have a set of additional parameters we can add to indicate that a link is broken, and to provide an alternative url for an archive of it. We make no attempt to do all the broken ones, because the job would just be impossibly too big, but we do add parameters to them occasionally, at opportunity. --Pi zero (talk) 18:21, 14 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Pi zero: maybe automatically provide a web.archive link whenever the original link gives a 404? Leaderboard (talk) 18:31, 14 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
The archived copies aren't always at web.archive; it doesn't always have one, and on at least one occasion I recall finding an archived copy elsewhere. I do hope eventually to provide semi-automated assistance for checking such links and for setting up additional fields as appropriate, which probably would involve checking for a 404 and checking for a copy on web.archive. --Pi zero (talk) 18:39, 14 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Leaderboard: Or maybe you're thinking of a pseudo-fix different from what I'm picturing. At any rate, I did these two. --Pi zero (talk) 18:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
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