38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY AND GONZALO RIVERO
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
- 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
- 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:
