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Context: Due to some sort of falling out, the Corpus of Contemporary English, British National Corpus, and several others moved from corpus.byu.org to english-corpora.org and changed their collective name, formerly being referred to as the "BYU Corpora".

We cite them pretty often. According to my SEDE search, there are about 565 instances of corpus.byu.org links across about 420 posts on the main site. None of these links currently work because the redirect is malformed, missing a slash after the .org (e.g. https://www.english-corpora.orgcoca/). While they should really fix it on their end, we can ensure our links work at least, using the link replacement tool, with staff approval. (The specific replacements would be http://corpus.byu.edu and https://corpus.byu.edu both getting replaced with https://www.english-corpora.org.)

If all the links were replaced, we would have the links at the bottom (duplicates removed). Any problems? We may need to do some manual fixing since some of them won't work even after the tool has run (but probably haven't worked for years). You can find the original posts by searching for something like url:coca/x.asp.

We also have 15 posts on meta that will need attention. Can the replacement be run across the entire network? Should it be? (Not a rhetorical question.) Some other SE sites have the same problem, namely ELL (131 posts) and Linguistics (21 posts). If I have to raise this question on their metas in addition I will (though I don't know that Linguistics has enough hits to qualify for automatic replacement).

Links we would have on ELU (main) after running the tool

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    The request is being submitted today.
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 21:32
  • @Slate Thanks! Will it be run just on ELU main or other sites? (ELU Meta, ELL, Linguistics)
    – Laurel Mod
    Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 21:36
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    I submitted it to be run network-wide (in practice, essentially affecting ELU/ELL/Ling + Metas with trace amounts from other sites).
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 21:43

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Thanks for raising this one to our attention. We've executed the change network-wide. As with all link replacements, we do expect a bit of routine cleanup work, so be on the lookout for any cases that look odd. But, let us know if you run into any major fallout as a result of the change.

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If you’re simply looking for community support or permission to run the existing search-and-replace tool to update the corpora links on EL&U*, you have my support and that of anyone who upvotes this answer (but not the support of anyone who downvotes it).

*I don’t feel comfortable speaking for other Stack Exchange sites like ELL or Linguistics

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  • I didn't know there was a link replacement tool available. I've just found that all the links from my website that say "umich.edu" or "www-personal.umich.edu" have been changed to websites.umich.edu. They'll probly forward OK, but I've been citing them for a long time and there's a lot of them here. What if anything should I do?
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 10, 2022 at 20:58
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    @JohnLawler I didn’t either, until this post. I’d recommend you simply ask the mods to run it on your behalf.
    – Dan Bron
    Commented May 10, 2022 at 20:59
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    @JohnLawler If you don't think the redirect is going to break, you can leave them alone, unless they're in a post that you happen to be editing anyway. The link replacement tool needs to be run by staff so they only do it when there's a lot of broken links (>100).
    – Laurel Mod
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 15:46
  • Thanks. I doubt it's crucial.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 11, 2022 at 16:07

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