https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/inte ... 49215.html
Bots have been written that convert a dead link to an archive.org or WebCite capture. Or something, ANYTHING. They are not used nearly as much as they should be.The effect means that vast amounts of news and important reference content are disappearing. Some 23 per cent of news pages include at least one broken link, and 21 per cent of government websites, it said – and 54 per cent of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WebCiteBOT (see the talkpage)
And for the best evidence nobody is driving the garbage scow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ebcitebot2
Major reason is obvious: this is tedious hard work. Not nearly as much "FUN" as grinding Pokemon trivia, reverting vandalism, banning editors, and fighting with each other on noticeboards.
There is a Wikiproject. Look at the list of their participants. I figure more than 90% of them quit Wikipedia years ago or are almost inactive. A few were blocked (this one was especially "charming"). Only a few of the remainder are doing ANY dead link repair that I can see. Some of them don't even bother--they just delete the bad links and leave the references hanging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... rticipants
The only major link-repairing bot in use today (as far as I can tell!!) is InternetArchiveBot. Co-authored by James Hare. Oh, the things I could tell you about him. The other author is Cyberpower678--a Pokemon fan whose interest in Wikipedia has been tailing off since 2020.
Both of them admit being paid by the Internet Archive to add more Archive links to Wikipedia.
Far from being enough to fix the millions of dead links.