Talk:Pawtucket/Central Falls station

Link archiving
Greetings! Regarding this revert...I was trying to figure out what "FRIP" means, but the reference following it was giving me a 404. Adding an archive link makes that source accessible to readers, and IABot does that automatically for all links. (Unfortunately that term doesn't seem to appear in the referenced source.) This revert breaks that citation again. Archiving links is a pretty standard operation that makes sure the links stay working permanently. Not sure what the downside would be? -- Beland (talk) 05:18, 14 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Archiving a bunch of live links makes the article harder to edit (by increasing the length of the wikitext) and less reader-friendly (by adding extra text to the citations). When a single citation needs archiving, it's best to do so manually, as I just did (I also believe IABot has a setting to ignore live links). I know it's a tiny bit extra work to do manually, but it's better to keep articles free of clutter.


 * FRIP apparently stands for Freight Rail Improvement Project (see here, for example), the project under which the dedicated freight track was installed. I don't think the acronym meaning is particularly pertinent here - all that's really relevant to the station is that the track exists - but I've put it in quotes to indicate that it's a named track. Cheers, Pi.1415926535 (talk) 06:19, 14 May 2021 (UTC)


 * It does not seem that IABot was able to actually tell the difference between live and dead links, and links can go dead at any time. The content of web pages can also change without the link going dead, but the new content might not support the referenced claim. So I think the additional parameters, though a bit more of an eyeful for editors, are worth it for readers. -- Beland (talk) 06:39, 14 May 2021 (UTC)