Wikipedia partners with the Internet Archive to preserve resources

Members of the Internet Archive are working with the Wikimedia Foundation to redirect dead links on Wikipedia to copies on the Wayback Machine. More than a million links on the English Wikipedia have already been redirected using automated software.

The software scans every link on Wikipedia or that still leads to an existing page. If the software encounters a 404 code, it changes the link to a copy on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The links on Wikipedia state that it is a page of the Internet Archive.

The developers show the English page about Easter Island as an example. Source 85 refers to a page that no longer exists on the original server. The link has therefore been modified to point to a copy of the page on the Wayback Machine.

The technique is now only applied to the English Wikipedia. The team announces that it plans to make it work in all other languages ​​as well. The team is also investigating whether it is possible to make the source links ‘self-healing’.