Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web
It&#x27;s amazing how little some trusted institutions care about this. For example, the BBC has been bragging about how many people rely on their coverage of the pandemic, but have an obnoxious habit of repeatedly overwriting old articles with new ones on similar topics and not keeping the old versions available. The history of a once-in-a-century pandemic with huge local and global impacts is literally being overwritten day by day.<p>Sometimes this helps them whitewash their screw-ups which have lead to widespread false beliefs. For example, after the UK government targetted and hit 100,000 Covid-19 tests in a day, the BBC ran an article falsely claiming Germany had achieved this a month earlier and linked it prominently on their news front page for about a month. A large proportion of the population probably saw this and now falsely believe it, it got brought up all the time as part of the narrative that the government&#x27;s big &quot;world-leading&quot; achievements were just playing catch up badly, but it was memory-holed from the article in a rewrite and they used that as an excuse for not publishing any correction - so unless historians dig deep in third-party archives, they&#x27;d never understand where that belief came from. (Apparently a previous version of the article also wrongly claimed France was carrying out more Covid-19 tests due to mistaking their weekly numbers for daily one, according to a correction which disappeared from the article after a few days and only exists in the Internet Archive now. I haven&#x27;t been able to find the original version of that claim.)