Concept

Find broken links that are easily fixed by matching with very similarly named articles. The work of finding these links is largely done. One or more methods work to fix them:

• adding redirects
• correcting links to point at the right article
• moving articles (less common)

Explanation of broken link listings

Format:

• Right-hand-side is broken links
• Left-hand-side is existing articles that look like they might apply
• (number) means that broken link appears next to multiple articles

Convention for working on these:

• Please don't remove any lines.
• strike broken links (only the link) you believe cannot be made a valid redirect
• if you create a redirect, the broken link will no longer be red, so no change is needed to show you finished a line
• if you need to strike a long list of lines, go ahead and use a single big fat strike grouping

Thanks in advance for any help. You don't need any special qualifications to work through the list. I've been doing it like this:

1. Click on the article and see who or what it is about
2. Click on each broken link (in red), then click on "What links here" (on the left) and note the context of the broken link (for people, look at professions, locations, dates, and so on).
3. Decide if the two are the same or not. If they are, add a redirect to the broken link by inserting #REDIRECT [[name of article]] and if not, put <s> and </s> around the broken link so nobody else will check it.

Broken links

I split this into multiple articles to help avoid edit conflicts a bit:

• Missing middle name, word, or initial A to M
• Missing middle name, word, or initial N to Z
• Middle name, word, and initial close matches
• Case mismatches
• Probable plurals
• Other approximate string matches: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P
  • length of both is longer than 5 characters
  • doesn't start or end with a number
  • length of broken link is not less than 2/3 the length of the article title
  • longest common substring is not less than 2/3 the length of the article title
  • 8% approximate string match in both directions (using String::Approx)
  • not including case mismatches and possible plurals

You can assume any broken link that is not struck through deserves a look. I suggest picking a letter at random.

Background

Brion was kind enough to prepare me some listings of articles and broken links and I wrote a program to find broken links that appear to be related to an already existing article. It's not 100% accurate and there are some conflicts, so humans are needed to figure out what's valid and what's not. I found some 1678 articles that could be linked from 2073 different broken links. When done with this list, I believe a good 500 broken links will be turned into valid and useful redirects. (Ha, everyone who said I was a rabid deletionist is proven wrong!)

Right now, the list is just based on middle names which I have noticed to be a frequent cause of broken links. However, I'll probably write some more complicated programs to find other near-matches if this turns out well.

Anyway, I could use some help. The lists (it's broken into two sub-pages now) are located at User:Daniel Quinlan/redirects1 and User:Daniel Quinlan/redirects2. Please follow the convention for noting when a broken link cannot be connected to an article (other than that, the page shouldn't really need to be edited aside from questions, notes, etc.) and have fun. I've already done about 70 or so, but need to sleep now. Daniel Quinlan 06:46, Nov 6, 2003 (UTC)

Since putting up the first two pages, I added another 11600 articles that can possibly be matched to an even larger number of redirects. Daniel Quinlan 05:22, Nov 10, 2003 (UTC)

Other notes

• If you run into any September 11th victims, just put (September 11th victim) after the redirect and leave it alone for now. We can handle the lot of them en masse later.
• Likewise, you can put (not sure) or other notes if necessary after a redirect.