WEB links on educational sites are breaking down at a surprising rate, “decaying” at random like radioactive nuclei. John Markwell and David Brooks, professors of biochemistry at the University of Nebraska, have been checking all the links on 515 websites used in their courses since November 2000, and found that 18.6 per cent of the links are now broken, giving each link a “half-life” of 55 months.
Educational links labelled .edu are the most likely to break, followed closely by .com and .org, the researchers told this week’s meetingof the Society for Experimental Biology.
