Task explanation
editOccasionally, editors place archived versions of sites as the primary |url=. This may be a link to Wayback Machine, WebCite, or similar. However, these sites are archiving library services and the page contents are not the source of the reference. The source is, in fact, the original url. Since the |url= and associated metadata has to point to the source of the citation, then it is incorrect to link directly to the archived version. Thus |archiveurl= and |archivedate= are used.
For the end-user, primary clickable link would still point to the archived version. What changes is that a note is made at the end of citation that this is an archived copy of a given source at a give date. The original url may be still valid, may be outdated, or may be dead. However, it was the original source and is correctly indicated as such. This also makes life easy for bots that check dead links and archive links (like this one). Use |deadurl=no if the links aren't actually dead.
Recognized archive formats:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20070928042306/http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/06/ballistics.html
- http://replay.web.archive.org/20070222012552/http://nflhistory.net/linescores/pdf/1920.pdf
- http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jbook.co.jp%2Fp%2Fp.aspx%2F2551602%2Fs%2F&date=2009-06-18
This will also fill the original |url= from the |archiveurl= if the original url is missing (A2U task variant).
The 'MAD' task variant fills missing archive dates in |archivedate= whenever valid |archiveurl= is found (or was found via above logic).
- See also: Remove incorrect Wayback usage from citation fields task.