User talk:Rotlink

LJer
Hi. I don't believe that dead links should be "fixed" if they are the exact text that someone posted, being quoted as a citation. Equinox ◑ 11:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Dead fixed links
Hi. We extremely appreciate your effort to improving Wiktionary, but some of your "fixed" links are still dead. --kc_kennylau (talk) 09:17, 24 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, see e.g. beigist. Please respond with a plan of action, in order to be unblocked. Equinox ◑ 16:35, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * For anyone who's not aware, Rotlink is indefinitely blocked on the English Wikipedia for running an unauthorized bot. See w:Wikipedia:Archive.is RFC for more information. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 16:40, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Rotlink is probably a bot, and does have a bot flag elsewhere. Ordinary opinion is that unapproved bots are not allowed; however, meta policy allows unapproved global bots running at no more than 1 edit per minute, and Rotlink generally stays below that. Local bot policy would apply to local edits only. Most bots run at a far higher rate than Rotlink, which is only doing a few edits per day. For some reason, there was a burst of activity here, with Rotlink hitting one edit per hour.


 * The Rotlink task is very simple: find dead links and replace them with live ones ot archive sites. Originally, Rotlink was mostly adding links to archive.is (and that's what the en.wiki RfC was about, not about Rotlink, per se), but during most of this year, almost all links are to archive.org. While it is not impossible that Rotlink will respond here, Rotlink's "plan of action" is very unlikely to change. The issue for Wiktionary is whether or not it wants that simple fixing of dead links. In the two cases above, there could be differing opinion.


 * In the first case, leaving a dead link in place will waste reader time. Replacing the link is actually preserving the original context and intention of the quote, removing it is making nonsense of it. If one wants to be a stickler, one could leave the quote intact but add a note, and I have no idea about Wiktionary policy on this, but as a reader, I'd want the link to work, and I wouldn't care that it was on an archive site, when it wasn't that way in the original, unless this was somehow relevant to the sense.


 * In the second case, it's likely that the archive.org page was taken down after Rotlink found the URL. The original link is now behind a pay wall. Does Wiktionary want that?


 * If Wiktionary wants a special bot that would adapt to these very special situations, it is probably not going to be Rotlink.

But Rotlink has 665 edits on this wiki (though less than 500 seem to be live; given that Rotlink doesn't create pages, it must have fixed links on pages that were not useful). It looks like the vast majority of the edits were good. I just saw this unexplained revert:. It restores a dead link. I am reverting. --Abd (talk) 20:06, 28 August 2014 (UTC)