Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Link rot
Link rot is the process by which hyperlinks to websites become unavailable. Unfortunately links to individual paintings seem to affected by this a lot.
Causes of link rot[edit]
Museums seem to remodel their website every once in a while. In this process often the url's of individual paintings change and the old url's stop working. It would be better if the museum would adopt stable URL's (persistent identifiers) or at least deploy redirects to forward the old url to the new one.
Most museums seem to have the bad habit of deleting paintings from their website when the painting leaves the collection. It would be better if they just update the status of the painting on their website.
Preserving pages with the Wayback Machine[edit]
The Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) is a service by the Internet Archive to archive individual web pages. If we consistently add every page we link to the the Wayback Machine, we can at least still see the page when the link breaks. This won't solve links broken in the past, but will prevent more damage in the future.
Automatic addition to Wayback Machine[edit]
A robot has been set up to automatically add links on paintings to the Wayback Machine. It currently only adds described at URL (P973) or identifier which are added as a statement. So different kind of links, links in qualifiers or links in sources are skipped. The actual number of missed links is probably quite low because the described at URL (P973) or identifier link is usually also used as the source.
We're just starting this so we have a bit of a backlog in links that need to be checked. This table is to keep track of that. It's based on the last edit to the painting.
| Period | Url's | Identifiers | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 1  Done |
||
| 2015 | 3812 Done |
||
| 2016 | 18282 Done |
||
| 2017 | 28231 Done |
||
| 2018-01 | 6780 to go | ||
| 2018-02 | 13945 to go | ||
| 2018-03 | 18136 to go | ||
| 2018-04 | 20000(?) to go | Check numbers | |
| 2018-05 | 1619 to go | ||
| 2018-06 | 2290 to go | ||
| 2018-07 | 11569 to go | ||
| 2018-08 | 3885 to go | ||
| 2018-09 | 7935 to go | ||
| 2018-10 | 2309 to go | ||
| 2018-11 | 7999 to go | ||
| 2018-12 | 23123 to go | ||
| 2019-01 | 12430 to go | ||
| 2019-02-22 | Done |
Done |
Ran 48 hours back bots Saturday 2019-02-23 in the evening |
| 2019-02-23 | Done |
. | Ran 48 hours back bot Sunday 2019-02-24 in the evening |
Updating broken links[edit]
In the future we can add archive URL (P1065) to broken links.
History[edit]
The sad incomplete history of link rot. Please only add collections for which all or a large part of the links stopped working.
| When | Museum | List | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | National Museum in Warsaw (Q153306) | Numbering system changed so all links are now to completely unrelated artworks | |
| December 2023 | Public art in Nijmegen (Q105138564) | New site, all links broken, permalinks available but not working on new site and also seems they changed the ID's for all the artworks | |
| 2023 | Mu.ZEE - Kunstmuseum aan Zee (Q1928672) | List | Most links broken (not sure if these ever worked) |
| 2022 | Kunstmuseum Den Haag (Q1499958) | List | Gemeentemuseum became Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Old site completely gone and unreachable. |
| 2021 | Dordrechts Museum (Q2874177) | List | Dordrechts Museum replaced their nice looking collection website with standard Adlib. All links broken. |
| 2020 | Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (Q840886) | List | New collection site, all links broken. |
| 2020 | Hungarian National Gallery (Q252071) | List | New collection site, all links broken. |
| 2020 | Fries Museum (Q848313) | List | New collection site, all links broken. |
| 2019 | Statens Museum for Kunst (Q671384) | List | Changed link stucture, all links just ended up and some generic search page |
| 2018 | Centraal Museum (Q260913) | List | New site, all links broken. |
| 2018 | Carnegie Museum of Art (Q1043967) | List | New collection website changed the link structure so all Carnegie Museum of Art artwork ID (P4686) links broke. |
| 2018 | Amsterdam Museum (Q1820897) | List | New collection website broke their links, but that was quickly fixed. The online research links broke too, got fixed and are broken again. A lot of the quite extensive research information is now unavailable. |
| 2018 | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Q679527) | List | New collection website changed the link structure. Links needed to be updated on all paintings. |
| 2017 | Frans Hals Museum (Q574961) | List | Worked at the start of 2017, probably broke during the year. New collection website is missing a lot of works and doesn't have inventory numbers |
| 2017 | Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Q924335) | List | New director, new interior, new website, all links broken. |
| 2016 | Kröller-Müller Museum (Q1051928) | List | Probably broke in 2016. New collection website doesn't contain inventory numbers |