Misplaced Pages

:Describe external links - Misplaced Pages

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Koyaanis Qatsi (talk | contribs) at 17:20, 5 May 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 17:20, 5 May 2004 by Koyaanis Qatsi (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Part of the Style and How-to Series

If you link to another website, you should give your reader a good summary of the site's contents, and the reasons why this specific website is relevant to the article in question. If you cite an online article, try to provide as much meaningful citation information as possible. Examples:

Link with uninformative description Link with informative description
  • The Memory Hole by Russ Kick, a website which "exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known" . It is regularly updated with new documents, which are often obtained by the editor himself through Freedom of Information Act requests. The site also provides links to reports on external sites.

If you are dealing with controversial issues, it is also useful to point out which sites take which stance (you could separate the links by proponents and critics, for example); funding information or relationships may also be interesting. When linking to commercial sites, you may also wish to provide information on registration requirements and other limits, especially unexpected ones.

Websites can take a long time to load, and a long time to evaluate. Try making it easier for the reader to choose which sites to visit. If a particular website is known to take a long time to load, or requires special software to interpret (for example, a large PDF file) then add a note to the description indicating this fact.