Dealing with linkrot
Over on Poynter Online, Amy Gahran addresses a reader submitted question about linkrot and that’s got me thinking about it. Linkrot is what happens when the pages you’ve linked to are no longer work because the URLs have moved. Maybe the site has been pulled down. Maybe the content management system was updated and the URLs are writ differently. Whatever the reason, the page isn’t there anymore.
So what happens when one of your links go bad? Amy writes, “if I find that one of my links has gone dead, I look to see if the same content exists at a new location and I update my link. If the destination content is completely gone, generally I just remove the link from my story. If that link was significant to the point of the story, I’ll note in an update ‘This page no longer available online as of DATE.’”
That’s well and good for online where you can get in and easily update. But what about for print? How many articles, journals, studies and books have outdated links? According to “The impact of impermanent Web-located citations” a study by Carmine Sellitto, Victoria University, Australia, 46% of all citations from between 1995 and 2004 are now broken links.
I’ve come across a project hosted at the University of Toronto that is aiming at countering this dillemna. WebCite is a consortium of publishers, editors, librarians and other interested parties who are seeking to create a reliable means of archiving websites referenced in scholarly articles. When citing a web page, you would list both the actual URL and an address at webcite.
For items of a less scholarly pursuit, I’ve had mixed luck with Archive.org’s WayBack Machine. Amy mentions Furl, a free social bookmarking service that saves a copy of pages as you bookmark them.
What would be nice is something that I don’t even have to think about. Imagine a system by which my linking to a page creates an automatic screencapture that is stored on my server’s archive. Periodically, every link on the site is checked automatically. If a broken link is found, the original link is re-writ to point to the screencap. Now there’s a WordPress plugin I could certainly get behind.
But until the day when it does everything for me and wraps it up in a nice tidy bow, what I personally try to do is ensure that each post can stand on its own. If a page is significant, then I try to quote from that page as well as link to it. And now that I know about Furl, it may be an idea to set up an account.
