Standard for link updates

Question

I get a lot of changes in my review queue that are simply updates to links in posts. While most of them are likely legitimate, I suppose I should be checking that the changes are needed and actually point to the right thing. I noticed that I was getting a little blase about this when I approved one change without checking it. I've since been trying to skip these as they are a bit tedious.

I've got mixed feelings about this because I think this is in large part a good thing when someone updates a bad link but I reviewing them to be a pain in the ass. I skipped one today and it came back to me. So I looked at the link where someone was updating a sourceforge link to a github link. Based on what's happened to soruceforge lately, I'm guessing that this is probably the right thing to do but both links work and present the same content. What is the standard here and how much time am I, as a reviewer, expected to put into figuring out if this change is kosher?

Answer 1

You should spend as much time as you feel comfortable reviewing to review. No one is watching the time you spend or making sure you spend enough time or do enough reviews. If you're going to review and either accept or reject a post, you should look at the edits and make sure they are worthy. If you can't make a decision for any reason, feel free to skip - it's why it's there.

As far as standards go, editing to update links is a common reason to edit. Changing a link to point at the most up-to-date repository, or switching to an archived URL if a site goes offline, or even editing in a comment that a link is dead and there may not be a replacement are all valid edits and should (after reviewing to ensure that it makes sense in context) be approved.

I actually jumped into the review queues after reading this and I think I saw an example of a Python for .NET link that was changed from SourceForge to GitHub. I spent about 1 minute looking at it - it appeared that the GitHub repository was actually actively maintained and used and the SourceForge repository wasn't, so I went ahead and approved the change.