Wikipedia:Bad links
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This report is an analysis of links (any "target" in double brackets: [[ ]]) from a database dump of the English Wikipedia. There are a number of common problems. Some problems (marked "Masked when viewing.") appear to be "fixed" when viewing the page, by the MediaWiki software. These still need to be fixed in the underlying wikicode, for easier automatic analysis of links, and in some cases, for easier human editing. Sometimes these problems are an indication of other errors in the surrounding text.
This report was last run on the 26 March 2006 database dump (partial report only, due to technical difficulties).
Further updates will require volunteer assistance. Please see Meta:Toolserver/Reports.
In order to help people find this project, consider using an edit summary like the following: Bad link repair ([[Wikipedia:Bad links|You can help!]])
Also, you may want to consider using AutoWikiBrowser to expedite the process as the program will fix a number of problems for you. However it won't catch all of them and all changes must be thoroughly checked. Make sure you read the AWB page thoroughly before using the software and please report any problems that you may come across. AWB can also encode URL and HTML entities to unicode.
Contents |
[edit] Bad spacing
Sometimes a space appears at the beginning or end of a link because someone accidentally put it there instead of in the surrounding sentence. Please check the context of the link to see if this is the case before fixing.
- There's a double space in the link, shown as "__". (Masked when viewing.)
- There's a space (shown as "_") at the end of the link. (Masked when viewing.)
- There's a space (shown as "_") at the beginning of the link. (Masked when viewing.)
- There's a space (shown as "_") before a "#". This might be because:
- Someone tried to link to an article with a "#" in the name. The character "#" cannot appear in article names, so please choose a new title to link to. Consider using {{pound}}.
- Someone tried to link to a specific section in an article, but accidentally left an extra space before the "#". Just delete the extra space.
- There are unbalanced brackets and article text is accidentally being included in the link. You'll need to untangle the confusion.
/spacing - New post from 25 January 2006 dump. -- Beland 08:55
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- 17:21, 22 February 2006 (UTC) -- Completely done! Just as a comment, the "Registered Historic Sites" per US State are just basically huge lists (some more than 200Kb) right now, and almost none of the articles have content (ie, Joe's Farm, Aunt Betty's Pharmacy, etc). Those sets of articles need serious working. Marcos Juárez 00:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] HTTP links
This usually happens because someone has used [[ ]] when they should have used [ ]. There may also be unmatched brackets. Please check the context of the link carefully in order to fix it properly.
- /http1 -- Partial update from 19 June 2006 dump. I found these using AWB's built-in dump searcher with "has bad links AWB will fix" as the only checked option. I set it to stop, though, after 5000 entries thinking it wouldn't reach that high. Unfortunately, it did, so this is only the first 5000 bad links. --M@thwiz2020 23:47, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Encoded characters
I will ask User:Curpsbot-unicodify to do another run on these. The bot does not fix templates, pages containing <math>, and may skip – and —, so there may be some that are missed, but it can probably handle most of them. -- Beland 03:44, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
This is what needs fixing:
- URL-encoded characters, in the form %NN, should be converted to the actual Unicode character. (Masked when viewing.)
- HTML entities, in the form &name; or &#XXXX; should be converted to the actual Unicode character. (Masked when viewing.)
These fixes will not cause browsers to mangle these characters.
[edit] Thank you
Thanks to everyone who has helped, including Bellhalla, Bergsten, Lox, SailorfromNH, SeventyThree, Sim man, SoberEmu, Bachrach44, Bad carpet, Bratsche, Claygate, DanMS, DragonflySixtyseven, Epolk, HoodedMan, JesseW, Muchness, No Guru, Vivenot, Woohookitty, and others.
