This is part of my ongoing project to get rid of all inapproriate links to YouTube, which is nearly all of them. According to policy at Wikipedia:External links, Wikipedia cannot link to sites which contain copyright infringements, which much of YouTube does, or sites which fail to provide licensing information, which even most of the possibly free content on YouTube is. The reasoning is obviously that we have no way of knowing whether it is free or not, and without licensing information we must assume it is a copyright infringement.
I did a search of the latest database dump (admittedly out of date) for links to YouTube in the main namespace only, and stuck stuck it at User:Dmcdevit/YouTube links, which still needs proper alphabetizing. The list is wikilinked, so that it can be grabbed by AWB, though that's imperfect, since I've been going through it already, so articles near the top may already be completed.
Procedure edit
I've been using the following edit sumary:
- Removing links to [[WP:EL#Restrictions_on_linking|"Sites which fail to provide licensing information"]] for video clips per [[WP:EL]].
I created the following regular expressions to use for AWB's find-and-replace function. Put each on of these in a separate section under "Find," in this order, and leave "Replace with" blank, so it will delete them. This seems to catch all the basic structures of which I can think, but you'll still have to watch it and clean up and formatting messes this may create, like empty parentheses, removal of text that was used as a link, hanging descriptions of the link, etc. Note, you may want to fill in the "Replace with" field with "{{fact}} for the three expressions replacing <ref> tags.
- \* (\[http://youtube\.com.*?\])
- \* (\[http://www\.youtube\.com.*?\])
- \* \{\{YouTube.*?\}\}
- \*(\[http://youtube\.com.*?\])
- <ref(?:\s*name=(?:[\'\"][^\'\"]+[\'\"]|[^>]+))?[\s\/]*>(\[http://youtube\.com[^\]]*?\])</ref>
- \*(\[http://www\.youtube\.com.*?\])
- <ref(?:\s*name=(?:[\'\"][^\'\"]+[\'\"]|[^>]+))?[\s\/]*>(\[http://www\.youtube\.com[^\]]*?\])</ref>
- \*\{\{YouTube.*?\}\}
- <ref.*?>\{\{YouTube.*?\}\}</ref>
- <ref(?:\s*name=(?:[\'\"][^\'\"]+[\'\"]|[^>]+))?[\s\/]*>\{\{YouTube[^\]]*?\}\}</ref>
- (\[http://youtube\.com.*?\])
- (\[http://www\.youtube\.com.*?\])