● Link Rot
A Pew Research Center study found 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone by 2023, and 54% of Wikipedia pages have at least one dead reference link.
This site's own answer is stub pages: a link that would 404 elsewhere resolves to a minimal placeholder here instead, tracked as a to-do rather than left as a dead end.
That only works for internal links, though. External citations are still exposed to whatever happens on someone else's server, which is the harder half of the problem, sometimes called reference rot or content drift when the URL survives but the content underneath it quietly changes.
Cool URIs Don't Change is the idea to design URLs so they never need to move in the first place.
- Links to
- stub pages · Cool URIs Don't Change