How do you manage references on a Wikipedia page when sources go offline?

Reference rot is a normal feature of any long-lived Wikipedia article – articles published in 2015 cite sources whose URLs have moved, whose publishers have shut down, or whose paywalls have changed. Wikipedia’s response is procedural: dead-link detection bots flag broken references, the InternetArchiveBot integrates with archive.org to retrieve archived versions, and editors can propose updated citations through the Talk page. For our work, the workflow is to identify the broken references on a client’s article, find current accessible versions through archive.org or by locating where the article moved to, and propose the citation updates through edit requests. Importantly, a broken URL does not invalidate the underlying source for notability purposes – the source existed and the citation can be repaired – but a sustained accumulation of broken references can erode an article’s perceived quality.