free-to-read openly available excerpt of sections of Newspapers.com articles which allow readers to see the same content as the editors researching for Wikipedia.11
We would like to eventually transition key publisher partners to a toll-free access referral program that could drastically enhance reader access to sources. Under this model, a reader clicking on a paywalled link on Wikipedia could gain full text access to the source without needing a login or affiliation, solely because the traffic is referred from Wikipedia. This would open to readers the scholarly resources on which Wikipedia is built, allowing them to truly use it as a starting point for research even if they are unaffiliated with well-resourced libraries or do not meet the criteria for access in the Library Card Platform.
Another factor blocking access to sources is linkrot—when content at a particular URL is moved or deleted—which leads to the previously live link becoming a dead link. A partnership with Internet Archive (IA) and volunteer community members led to more than one million outbound broken links on English Wikipedia being replaced with archived versions, ensuring that readers are still able to access the original sources cited.12 Using a Wikipedia bot and IA's Wayback Machine, Wikipedia articles are scanned to test if they are dead; if they don't properly resolve then the Internet Archive version most-closely dated to when the original link was added is inserted if available. Continued work in this area will expand the process to other language Wikipedias and implement methods to fortify our online citations against linkrot problems from the very moment when they are first added to Wikipedia.