Commons:Archive external links

This page is a work in progress page, not an article or policy, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. Please offer suggestions on the talk page.

Commons community has reached to a consensus to archive all external links on Commons files with a reliable archiving service such as Wayback Machine or perma.cc in order to avoid link rotting obfuscate licensing information of files. Archiving external links can also be useful to prove that a certain work was once available under a free license in case the copyright holder changes their mind later. This can also reduce the workload for license reviewers.

However, it is still not clear how the idea should be implemented or even who should implement it. Feel free to provide more feedback at the talk page or even take up the task.

For the original discussion, see Special:Permalink/363808505#Proposal to run a bot to archive every external link using the Internet Archive on Wikimedia Commons.

Video files

Videos that are uploaded using the tool Video2Commons, displays a direct link to archive.org and archive.is which saves the URL if already not archived if archived shows the index of archived pages. It's actually due to the templates used i.e. {{From YouTube}} and {{From Vimeo}}.

• Demo:
  

File:A trip through japan with the ywca ca 1919.webm has View/save archived versions on archive.org and archive.today adjacent to the original source. You may click on the following to test this out.
YouTube: A trip through japan with the ywca ca 1919 – View/save archived versions on archive.org and archive.today