Robert McCloskey

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}}
• Does the source URL have an archive available? If not...
  • Can the citation be verified if the URL was removed (e.g. newspaper or journal content off-line)?
    • Remove the URL and keep the citation
  • Is the citation unverifiable without a URL (e.g. web-only content)?
    • Remove the entire citation per WP:V: unverifiable

Bots that can usurpify automatically with the above steps:

• WP:WAYBACKMEDIC—Report usurped domains to WP:URLREQ

• WP:JUDI—Ongoing mass usurpation of expired domains across all Wikimedia projects