User:H3llBot/U2A

H3llBot This user account is a bot operated by Hellknowz (talk). It is a legitimate alternative account, used to make repetitive automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually. The bot is approved, but currently inactive; the relevant requests for approval can be seen here. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.
Home	Talk page (Issues, problems, questions)	Active tasks	Archiving dead links via Internet Archive (ADL, MCD, MDY, RDT)
			Converting citation urls pointing to archived copy to archive fields (U2A, A2U, MAD)
			Remove incorrect Wayback usage from citation fields (RWF)
			Converting {{Wayback}} template to preceding citation's archive fields (W2A)
			Move links from author/editor fields to author/editorlink= (ALA)

Task explanation

Occasionally, editors place archived versions of sites as the primary |url=. This may be a link to Wayback Machine, WebCite, or similar. However, these sites are archiving library services and the page contents are not the source of the reference. The source is, in fact, the original url. Since the |url= and associated metadata has to point to the source of the citation, then it is incorrect to link directly to the archived version. Thus |archiveurl= and |archivedate= are used.

For the end-user, primary clickable link would still point to the archived version. What changes is that a note is made at the end of citation that this is an archived copy of a given source at a give date. The original url may be still valid, may be outdated, or may be dead. However, it was the original source and is correctly indicated as such. This also makes life easy for bots that check dead links and archive links (like this one). Use |deadurl=no if the links aren't actually dead.

Recognized archive formats:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20070928042306/http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/06/ballistics.html
• http://replay.web.archive.org/20070222012552/http://nflhistory.net/linescores/pdf/1920.pdf
• http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jbook.co.jp%2Fp%2Fp.aspx%2F2551602%2Fs%2F&date=2009-06-18

This will also fill the original |url= from the |archiveurl= if the original url is missing (A2U task variant).

The 'MAD' task variant fills missing archive dates in |archivedate= whenever valid |archiveurl= is found (or was found via above logic).

See also: Remove incorrect Wayback usage from citation fields task.

Links

• Bot request for approval – H3llBot 4.
• Bot request for approval – H3llBot 6.
• Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 35#Correct archive parameters if url is archive.org
• Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_37#Cleanup_CAT:AWBC

Related

• Category:Pages with archiveurl citation errors