User talk:Ilmari Karonen/fixarxivlinks.js

This user script semi-automatically fixes arXiv links pointing to the temporary "arxiv.org/PS_cache" or the obsolete "arxiv.org/ftp" URLs. If you wish to use this script yourself, add the line to your monobook.js (or to the appropriate .js page for other skins) and clear your browser cache. Then visit one of the links below and click any "FIX" links that appear in the list. (I find tabbed browsing to be useful for this.) Check the diffs for correctness, fix any problems you find and click save.

Some usage notes:
 * The script changes any matching links to point to the abstract page, from which PDF, PostScript and other versions are easily available. Always check the diffs before saving and remove any spurious "PDF format" notes the script doesn't catch.  If there's already a link to the abstract present (possibly via the  template or the  interwiki syntax), it's pointless to duplicate it; I find it best to just locate the URLs fixed by the script and manually change "/abs/" to "/pdf/" in such cases.  Adjust the edit summary to reflect this.
 * The script now attempts to detect this situation and adjust its behavior automatically; however, this feature is still limited and may not always work.
 * The script doesn't touch any links using the stable "arxiv.org/pdf" URLs. You may want to consider changing these manually to link to the abstract page instead, since that's usually more convenient to readers.  You may also wish to adjust all arXiv links on the page to use the same hostname; the script (currently) normalizes all links it fixes to use the plain "arxiv.org" hostname, but doesn't touch any other, non-broken arXiv links that may be present.
 * Some talk pages (e.g. Talk:Jack Sarfatti/Archive 4) may contain deliberate links to the temporary/broken URLs. These should probably be left alone.
 * When adding new citations to arXiv documents, consider using the template or the other citation templates with "id = ".  It would be nice if the script was smart enough to automatically convert arXiv citations to template format, or at least to use the  interwiki syntax, but that would be a lot more difficult than simple URL mangling.
 * For general advice on citing and linking to the arXiv, see http://arxiv.org/help/arxiv_identifier_for_services.

Feel free to leave any bug reports or other comments below. If the issue is urgent, use my talk page or e-mail me.