Wikipedia:WikiProject External links/Geocities

This is a task force of WikiProject External links created specifically to check and verify the inclusion of links to Geocities, directly or in archive.

Background
GeoCities is an international web hosting service. Founded in 1994, it is still in existence in Japan but shut down its United States division in 2009. Content on GeoCities is self-published, and as a result many of the external links to GeoCities on Wikipedia do not accord with the External links guidelines. This taskforce was assembled to address the issue following conversation about the issue in August 2010 at the external links noticeboard.

Taskforce goals
The goals of this taskforce are to evaluate the GeoCities pages (or archives of them) linked from Wikipedia's articles to determine their suitability for inclusion. If the links are being used as an external link and they do not meet external link guidelines, they should be removed. If they are being used as references, but the links do not meet reliable sourcing standards, they should be replaced with a fact or with a better reference; if the material they are supporting seems controversial and particularly if it is supporting a fact about a living person, the material they support should be removed. Where the links do seem appropriate for inclusion, it may be necessary to add a link to an acceptable archive.

User:Amalthea has created a script to aid with both review and location of archives. When the script is enabled, it will provide via javascript a viewable link to you of an archived version of a geocities link at the top of an article. You can then more easily follow the archived version to evaluate it, and if the link is acceptable can easily copy it into the article to replace the former deadlink. (If the link is used within the cite web template, you should not replace the link but instead add  to the template.) The script will also provide links to the Wayback version of Oocities archives, which are blacklisted.

To implement the script, add  to your monobook or vector skin script.

Locating articles
There are several ways to locate articles for evaluation and cleanup. There is a static list generated on August 19, 2010.
 * WikiProject Spam/LinkSearch/geocities.com/All:List as of 2010-08-19, obtained via an external link query run by

You may also check

Volunteers

 * Questionic: I have already done a small exploration of 12 random GeoCities links, whose results you can see here: Geocities link-editing project. Questionic (talk) 04:11, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Moonriddengirl: Tend to be busy with copyright cleanup, but I've been poking at this in my spare time for a couple of weeks.
 * Kuru: Spare time hobby. I've noticed that many of the old geocities sites did indeed move off without creating a redirect.  A quick google search on an obscure line of text can quickly locate the new, updated location.
 * Katherine: Choosing a selection at random and doing what can be done.
 * Colfer2: Working on repairing Oocities.com issues. See Talk.