Talk:Gerhard Bassenge

Ruinous bot change
Please quit destroying the linkage to http://www.geocities.com/%7Eorion47/ in this article. By applying the bot to it, you ruin it as a source citation in several ways:

1) You limit access to only the "cover page" of this website, as all screens in this website share the same URL. As I explained in both a footnote to the article and in the edit summary in my reversion which you have now re-reverted, it takes several clicks to get to Bassenge's page and/or the website's bibliography. When your bot has finished inflicting its damage, exactly none of that is possible.

2) You are substituting an outdated dysfunctional version of the website for the current functional one.

3) Information from this website supplies a great deal of the material for this article. Nullifying it as you have done leaves the material subject to removal, and reduces the article to a stub.

I would appreciate acknowledgment of this via talk-back. In the meantime, I am going to once again change the article to a form with functional cites, and would appreciate your leaving it that way.

Georgejdorner (talk) 13:09, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
 * First of all, Geocities closed on October 26, 2009. The website cannot have been updated since then, as according to Yahoo even the "premium" sites that weren't taken offline cannot be updated anymore, so the archive from 2010 that the bot is inserting cannot be "outdated". There is also no guarantee that Yahoo will keep these old "premium" sites around forever. Second, most Geocities sites are not reliable sources; I don't know the details of this particular site, but if you can find something more reliably published that would certainly help matters. Third, you might want to find a different site anyway, as that site's Java crashes my browser and therefore may crash other readers' browsers as well. And fourth, unless there is some sort of JavaScript on the pages (or something in the Java applet) that redirects the visitor to their frameset, you should be able to link to the actual page that is displayed in the main content frame instead of relying on readers to dig through the website looking for your information. Anomie⚔ 15:48, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I was unaware that Geocities had closed. However, your bot cutting the connection with the website instantly instead its lapsing in the natural course of affairs doesn't improve the situation. It cuts the user off from the bibliography that makes this site more reliable than its unreferenced mirrors.

I know nothing of Java's function in directing readers toward pages. I do know that when I click on the URL left by the bot, I can get no further than an incomplete entry page to the site. I also have observed, by actual test, that all screens of the site share the same URL in the unaltered listing, when I click through them to the bibliography or to Bassenge's bio page. This is actual practice, not theory.

It may be that this link may be broken in the future. That does not mean there is a need to use a bot to break it immediately.

Georgejdorner (talk) 20:48, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Recent edit
Preserving here by providing this link; my rationale was: "c/e; npov; uncited intricate detail unrelated to subject's notability". --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:25, 2 December 2018 (UTC)