Something is rotten in the state of our links

A Pew Research Center study shows that the problem of link rot — when online content disappears due to hyperlinks failing to connect to a web site — is a growing problem that threatens the availability of information on the internet: 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 are no long accessible, just 10 years later.

As an academic who not only writes articles, but also documents them religiously through content curation that often takes me longer than the writing itself, and on which I base much of my academic activity, the problem is of particular concern, and I have written about it on previous occasions.

Going through old articles on my page and finding broken links is now very common. Over the course of more than 21 years of writing, the sad reality is to find pages with broken links is Other sites that place great importance on the preservation of information, such as Wikipedia, have adopted solutions: they add another version that links to the same page archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a task that involves creating a copy in such a way as to ensure that it is not the same as the Wayback Machine. The article is available there. The Internet Archive is a non-profit project that already contains hundreds of billions of copies of pages, a true marvel for documentary purposes.