Usurped domains are used by spammers, squatters, malware, SEO, phishing or other fraudulent activity. Typically they are legitimate domains that expired and were hijacked.
The following is a decision tree for each citation. It can be followed manually, or implemented algorithmically by bot.
- Does the source URL have an archive available? If yes..
- Is it in a CS1|2 template (eg.
((cite web)))? If yes..
- Add
|url-status=usurped, |archive-url= and |archive-date=
- Is it a square-bracketed or bare URL? If yes..
- Wrap the archive URL (with or without square brackets) in
((usurped))
- Is no archive available? If yes..
- Can the citation be verified if the URL was removed (eg. newspaper or journal content off-line)?
- Remove the URL and keep the citation
- Is the citation unverifiable without a URL (eg. web-only content)?
- Remove the entire citation per WP:V: unverifiable
Bots that can usurpify automatically with the above steps:
- WP:JUDI - ongoing mass usurpation of expired domains across all Wikimedia projects