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I used to refer MSO tag wikis in the past, like this: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/broken-windows/info and especially like this:

would you mind explaining more on what it does and why do you recommend it as answering the question asked? "Link-only answers" are not quite welcome at Stack Exchange

FWIW, the latter reference is used several hundreds times in comments at Programmers.

After the split, some of these links became dead, what would be the recommended way to handle this?

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  • 3
    OOooh, I see what you did there; great example of the broken windows concept!
    – Martijn Pieters
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:32
  • 2
    +1 - Though, not sure how this relates to the broken windows theory. No one would see those broken links and go, "Well, these links aren't being maintained. Might as well go post more broken links!"
    – Andrew Cheong
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:33
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    Never mind. I'm wrong. The general theory is that broken windows lead to greater levels of disorder (so it's not necessarily that anyone posts more broken links, but simply perceives that something isn't being maintained).
    – Andrew Cheong
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:38
  • I guess for now, you could run a SEDE query searching for all such comments and replace them (manually) with updated versions. Ick.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:39
  • @MartijnPieters nope :) most of "link-only" references at Programmers I mention are in deleted posts - if answerer or 10Ker see it, these are expected to help them figure why it's deleted and what can be done to salvage. But... there's no way to find these with SEDE, nor edit for non-diamond user (only option is to flag for deletion)
    – gnat
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:43
  • @gnat: Ah, yes, there's that too.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:43
  • Since these are stable URLs (no post IDs; please tell me you didn't link to the revision histories...), the easy solution here is to just copy the contents of the relevant MSE wikis to MSO.
    – Shog9
    Apr 17, 2014 at 20:52
  • @Shog9 if memory serves I sometimes refer post histories - but this should be very rare and for purely technical, internal, not very important reasons. Mainstream use is to communicate wiki content, not the details about how it was edited
    – gnat
    Apr 18, 2014 at 5:28

1 Answer 1

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Ok. I just copied most of these over from MSE verbatim.

Not the most elegant solution, but... No more broken links.

Of course, most of the tags will be deleted in 24 hours and I'll have to re-create them after we migrate questions that actually use them. But, the concept is sound.

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    I was the person who upvoted you to 200k. I feel so POWERFUL
    – Doorknob
    Apr 21, 2014 at 18:20

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