How do I update Wikipedia citations for pages which are no longer available?

Question

The Wikipedia page for User Account Control includes the following citation.

Bott, Ed (2007-02-02). "What triggers User Account Control prompts?".

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Currently this citation leads to a 404 error, meaning the article is no longer available.

It appears the page was removed fairly recently, as I was able to find an archived version on Wayback Machine from July 2016. I want to update the citation to use the archived version, but I'm not sure how to accomplish this.

How do I update Wikipedia citations for pages that are no longer available?

Answer 1

Many citations use the Cite web template, or any of the other Citation Style 1 templates. All of these have an archive-url, archive-date and dead-url parameter. Simply add these to the citation.

• archive-url is of course the url to the Wayback Machine (or another archival website)
• archive-date should be set to the date the webpage was archived, preferably in the same date formatting as the existing date parameter.
• dead-url should be set to yes or no, depending on whether or not the original url is dead. This will change which of the links (archive-url or url) is linked to first in the rendered citation.

For the Citation you mentioned, you can see in this diff how I've done this.