While Wikipedia is still generally not accepted for use in colleges and universities as citation, the platform does try to maintain its credibility by linking to actual sources in their articles. Now given how old some of these Wikipedia entries are, you might have discovered on more than one occasion that some of these source links are broken.Thankfully the folks at the Internet Archive are here to the rescue as they have announced that they have managed to “fix” over 9 million broken links on Wikipedia by pointing them towards Wayback Machine (which is basically a cache of various internet websites and pages that may no longer exist).
According to the organization, “For the past 3 years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a ‘404’, or ‘Page Not Found’). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with.”
This is by no means “done” as the Internet Archive plans to expand their work, such as checking and fixing other media and formats, including digital books and academic papers. That being said, cached websites might not necessarily work the way an active page works, but at least being able to get the gist of a source is still better than nothing.
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