[bertil]

Actually, that this could happen (and did routinely) was seen as resilience by TimBL, a feature that allowed anyone to work on their own stuff without having to ask for permission. Having software that could have imperfection was what made the original idea revolutionary. The tone was more encyclopedic to encourage researcher at the time to contribute and update their link when they knew the target was changed, but they could very well not do that.

That first web page still exists because of the emotional value, but the pages this was linking to (or pages those were linking to, etc.) lost their interest at some point. That’s natural.