This page is dedicated to discussions related to use of the FABLE system ^[1] to patch dead external links on English Wikipedia. FABLE is the outcome of research conducted at the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. Given a broken link to a web page, the FABLE system (which stands for Finding Aliases for Broken Links Efficiently) attempts to find the new URL at which that same page now exists on the web. As compared to an archived copy of the page, users can access up-to-date page content and all functionality on the page (e.g., those which rely on communicating with the page's origin servers) will work.

Example diff: Special:Diff/1192656462/1218233409

As a first step, we have run FABLE on 18,000 (i.e., roughly 10%) of all the links that have been marked permanently dead ^[2]. FABLE identified new URLs for about 1,400 of these links.

We have created a page ^[3] at which one can tag each of these URL replacements identified by FABLE as Correct or Incorrect; by default, all of them are tagged as Unsure. We are soliciting feedback on this initial version of the page, so that we can make it easier to use.

Update: As of April 2024 all of the URLs have been verified and changes uploaded to Wikipedia. The next round of data will be available in the summer of 2024.

Please use the talk for questions and discussions.