124,000+ Wikipedia links blocked in Europe

[Bezdomni]

As I mentioned about three weeks ago, tronc.com is blocking all their sites in Europe in order to avoid any GDPR worries. This news has slowly filtered to JimboTalk. The part of the Wikipedia corpus that has become unverifiable from Europe:

Number . . insource:"string.goes.here"
62,338 . . . latimes.com (still blocked though I believe tronc.com has sold/is selling the LA Times)
23,851 . . . chicagotribune.com
15,454 . . . nydailynews.com
7,484 . . . . baltimoresun.com
5,521 . . . . orlandosentinel.com
4,820 . . . . sun-sentinel.com
2,875 . . . . courant.com
2,140 . . . . sandiegouniontribune.com
124,483 . . . tronc.com

Not to worry though, even if tronc.com has gone dark, a moar better set of RS (more than double its size) is still verifiable!

67,160 . . . blogspot.com
55,503 . . . facebook.com
51,516 . . . wordpress.com
35,735 . . . twitter.com
20,379 . . . myspace.com
13,690 . . . flickr.com
12,321 . . . geocities.com
8,641 . . . . linkedIn.com
6,933 . . . . instagram.com
6,521 . . . . tumblr.com
278,399 . . total

ps: (t.m.i...) the numbers above refer only to en.wp. Adding German, French and Spanish wikipedia would add another 12,835 LA Times references gone dark, for example.

[Dysklyver]

For any Wikipedians interested in fixing this, a solution would be to ask cyberpower to run his IAbot on these sites to add archive links. Anyone in Europe would then be able to check the archive. Otherwise these are basically dead links for a substantial number of people.

[Bezdomni]

Actually, the number of actual references is surely exaggerated in the thread title. I should change it to "links". Moreover, as you point out, some may well have already been archived.

[Poetlister]

For any Wikipedians interested in fixing this, a solution would be to ask cyberpower to run his IAbot on these sites to add archive links. Anyone in Europe would then be able to check the archive. Otherwise these are basically dead links for a substantial number of people.

Anyone with any knowledge of the Internet can use an open proxy to get an IP address that is apparently in the USA. You probably won't be able to edit Wikipedia with it, as most open proxies are blocked, but you can verify references.

[Dysklyver]

Actually, the number of actual references is surely exaggerated in the thread title. I should change it to "links". Moreover, as you point out, some may well have already been archived.

IAbot won't cover these without manual intervention, and the process to archive manually is tedious, so probably not very many yet.

Anyone with any knowledge of the Internet can use an open proxy to get an IP address that is apparently in the USA. You probably won't be able to edit Wikipedia with it, as most open proxies are blocked, but you can verify references.

Yeah, but that's a ton of effort, think of the readers!

[Bezdomni]

It's also harder to get fired from the social media platforms I mentioned than it is from tronc. §

Wikipedia is a special case, it is pretty easy to get run off the platform there. It's a bit of a fun-house mirror: it was pointing to itself 57,404 times, when I created this link.

[Dysklyver]

It's a bit of a fun-house mirror: it was pointing to itself 57,404 times, when I created this link.

A collection of stuffed up templates, hidden comments, and circular citations, with a few bollocked internal links in the wrong format for good measure!

[Bezdomni]

Yep, I was still puzzling that out in the edit box...

Many of these links are to weird templates & alphabet soups, maybe I should take Wikipedia off my list, because there is admittedly a lot of non-sourcy interference in the results for "wikipedia.org"

Wikipedia

Mmm... that's a better solution. Not sure the same would be justified for The Daily Mail though. I don't think it ecologically sound to encourage archiving all 27,256 of those remaining links... ( 80 have been deleted in the past two weeks, because WP:DAILYMAIL, !censored, &c. )

[Poetlister]

There must be millions of internal links using [[article name]]; you're only finding ones where, for whatever reason, they use the full URL.

[Bezdomni]

There must be millions of internal links using [[article name]]; you're only finding ones where, for whatever reason, they use the full URL.

Right, this is not links in the rendered HTML. The Wikipedia case is probably unknowable (google estimates the number of links at 15.7 million if I use a circular saw like site:en.wikipedia.org +"wikipedia org". Adding a dot ( site:en.wikipedia.org +"wikipedia.org" ) adds 2.9 million... ^^