How to update Wikipedia citations for pages which are no longer available

wikipedia

The Wikipedia page for User Account Control includes the following citation.

Bott, Ed (2007-02-02). "What triggers User Account Control prompts?".


Currently this citation leads to a 404 error, meaning the article is no longer available.

404 error

It appears the page was removed fairly recently, as I was able to find an archived version on Wayback Machine from July 2016. I want to update the citation to use the archived version, but I'm not sure how to accomplish this.

How do I update Wikipedia citations for pages that are no longer available?

Best Answer

Many citations use the Cite web template, or any of the other Citation Style 1 templates. All of these have an archive-url, archive-date and url-status parameter. Simply add these to the citation.

  • archive-url is of course the url to the Wayback Machine (or another archival website)
  • archive-date should be set to the date the webpage was archived, preferably in the same date formatting as the existing date parameter.
  • url-status should be set to either dead, live, unfit, or usurped. If the original URL is still available, set it to live, otherwise, set it to dead. This will change which of the links (archive-url or url) is linked to first in the rendered citation. If the original link is no longer suitable at all (perhaps because the someone else owns that domain now) set it to unfit or usurped, which will prevent the original link from rendering at all.

For the Citation you mentioned, you can see in this diff how I've done this. Note: url-status used to be dead-url, which has been deprecated. My edit from July 2018 has been updated in September 2019, see this diff.