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This guideline is a part of the English Misplaced Pages's Manual of Style.
It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.		Shortcut
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Misplaced Pages is not a web directory; no page should be dominated by or consist solely of a collection of external links. However, a small number of highly relevant external links to further information can enhance an article. This guideline assists editors in identifying what is and isn't a "highly relevant" link.

Misplaced Pages is not a web directory

While some external links are welcome in the article (see below), one should remember that it is not Misplaced Pages's purpose to include a comprehensive list of external links related to the topic. If the site or page you want to link to includes information that is not yet a part of the article, please consider using it as a source first. Refer to the citation guideline for instructions on citing sources. Links not used as citations should be kept to a minimum.

Rather than creating a long list of external links within an article, editors should link to a related category in the the Open Directory Project which is entirely devoted to creating relevant directories of links pertaining to various topics. If there is no relevant category, you may want to create one. You can request help finding or create a category by placing {{Directory request}} on the article's talk page.

Editors should try to avoid linking to multiple pages from the same website, instead trying to find an apropriate page to link to that will provide links within the site.

If you believe that an external links section has gotten out of hand, then you can mark it for attention of other editors by placing {{External links}} at the top of the section.

What to link to

In Misplaced Pages, it is possible to include links to external websites, known as "external links". Many articles have a small section containing a few external links. There are a few things which should be considered when adding an external link.

  • Is it accessible?
  • Is it proper (useful, tasteful, etc.)?
  • Is it entered correctly?

Links should each be considered on their merits, using the following guidelines. In an article with many proposed external links, asessment should become stricter to reduce the amount of links to a smaller number.

What should be linked to

  1. Articles about any organization, person, web site, or other entity should link to the official site if there is one.
  2. An article about a book, a musical score, or some other media should link to a site hosting a copy of the work if none of the "Links normally to be avoided" or "What cannot be linked to" criteria apply.
  3. Sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article. Ideally this content should be integrated into the Misplaced Pages article, in which case the link would remain as a reference. However, in some cases this is not possible because of a site's copyright issues, unencyclopedic level of detail, or other reasons.
  4. Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as professional athlete statistics, screen credits, interviews, or online textbooks.

Links to be considered

  1. For albums, movies, books, and other creative works, one or two links to professional reviews.
  2. A web directory category when deemed appropriate by those contributing to an article, with preference to open directories.
  3. Very large pages should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Worldwide, many use Misplaced Pages with a low-speed connection. Unusually large pages should be annotated as such.
  4. Foreign language sites, and sites requiring registration, should only be considered in special cases. See the sections dedicated to them below.

Links normally to be avoided

Unless there is a specific and clear overiding reason, the following links are usualy to be avoided,

  1. Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article here would have once it becomes a Misplaced Pages:Featured article.
  2. Any site that misleads the reader by use of factualy inaccurate material or unverifiable research. Editors should always prefer Reliable sources.
  3. Links that are added to promote a site, that primarily exist to sell products or services, with objectionable amounts of advertising, or that require payment to view the relevant content, colloquially known as external link spamming. For example, instead of linking to a book's entry on Amazon.com or another bookstore site, use the "ISBN" linking format, giving readers an opportunity to search a wide variety of free and non-free book sources.
  4. Sites that are inaccessible to a significant proportion of the community, such as sites that only work with a specific browser.
  5. Direct links to documents that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content, unless the article is about such rich media. If you do link to such material make a note of what application is required.
  6. Links to search engine results of websites.

What cannot be linked to

For Policy or Technical reasons, editors are restricted from linking to the following, without exception.

  1. Sites that violate the copyrights of others per contributors' rights and obligations. Sites which fail to provide licensing information or to respond to requests for licensing information should not be used. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States.
  2. A website that you own or maintain, even if the guidelines above imply that it should be linked to. This is in line with the conflict of interests guidelines. If it is relevant and informative link that should otherwise be included, mention it on the talk page and let neutral and independant Misplaced Pages editors decide whether to add the link.
  3. Sites that match the spam blacklist. Pages that contain links matching the blacklist cannot be saved.

Avoid spurious links

There is often a great temptation to add sites that are only indirectly related to the article's subject. For example, linking to the various fansites related to a TV show, linking to a Blog writer's comments on a news event, linking to a forum post about an video game. This kind of linking should meet one of two tests.

  1. Links directly relevent to the article. It should be a simple excersize to show how the link is directly and symetricaly related to the articles subject. This means that there is both a relation from the page to the subject, and a relation from the subject to the page. For example, the officialy sanctioned fanzine and internet forum of a rock band has a direct and symetric relationship to the rock band. An alternative forum run by fans is not symetricaly related to the rock band, as the rock band has only indirect connections with that forum.
  2. Links that statisfy an acceptable reason to link to the site beyond an indirect relation to the article's subject. Such links should not fail the guidance on what not to link to and the site should be of a high standard.

Sites requiring registration

Many otherwise valuable sites are of limited use to most readers because the site requires registration or a paid subscription. Many on-line newspapers require registration to access some or all of their content, while some require a subscription. On-line magazines frequently require subscriptions to access their sites or for premium content. If old newspaper and magazines articles are archived, there is usually a fee for accessing them.

A site that requires registration or a subscription should not be linked to unless:

  • It is being used as link within a reference properly following the citation guideline,
  • The web site itself is the topic of the article, or
  • It has relevant content of substantially higher quality than any available from other websites.

Foreign language links

English language links are strongly preferred in the English-language Misplaced Pages. It may be appropriate to have a link to a foreign language site, such as when an official site is unavailable in English, when the link is to the subject's text in its original language or they contain visual aids such as maps, diagrams, or tables, per the guideline on foreign-language sites.

When the external links are to sites in multiple languages, it can be useful to label them with language icons, including labeling the English-language sites in the list with {{en icon}}, which shows as Template:En icon. These are available for most languages, and follow the usual two-letter language codes: for example, {{es icon}}, {{fr icon}}, etc.

Redirection sites

Do not use URL redirection sites in external links. Such sites include tinyurl.com and makeashorterlink.com. Most of these sites are listed in the m:Spam blacklist because they are frequently abused by linkspammers, which means that it is not possible to save a page that contains such a link. Since URL redirection sites are added to the blacklist whenever abuse occurs, you may create problems for future editors by using them.

Permanent URL sites, like purl.org, may be a different case, as sometimes the PURL version is considered by the site owner to be a more official URL than the direct URL — in that case, the PURL should be used.

Rich media

It is acceptable to link to pages rendered in normal HTML or plain text. Check that the content type of page linked to is "text/html" or "text/plain", as some pages may instead be rendered solely by platform dependant plugins. Avoid directly linking to any content that requires special software, or an add on to a browser. It is always prefered to link to a page rendered in normal HTML that contains embedded links to the rich media.

In an instance where a link to rich media is deemed appropriate, an explicit indication of the technology needed to access the content must be given, as in the following examples:

Avoid undue weight

On articles with multiple points of view, the number of links dedicated to one point of view should not overwhelm the number dedicated to other equal points of view, nor give undue weight to minority views. You should attempt to add comments to these links informing the reader of their point of view. If one point of view dominates informed opinion, that should be represented first. For more information, see Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view – in particular, Misplaced Pages's guidelines on undue weight.

Longevity of links

It is very important to consider if the link will still remain relevent and acceptable to the article in the future. Editors should make some effort to assure the link will be consistantly relevent and acceptable for the foreseable future. For example, it is not useful to link to a homepage that changes often and merely happens to have a relevant picture or article on its front page at the moment. Similarly, be very wary of citing an unstable page as a source.

What can be done with a dead external link

See also: Misplaced Pages:Dead external links

Links to dead URLs in a list of external links are of no use to Misplaced Pages articles. Such dead links should either be removed, or updated with archived versions, which may be found at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Note however, that the matter can be quite different when these links are references: see Misplaced Pages:Citing sources#What to do when a reference link "goes dead".

Note that some dead links are caused by vandalism (for example, a vandal disabling links to products competing with the vandal's favored product). It may therefore be worth checking to see if there is a working link in earlier versions of article. Some vandalism of this type is quite subtle, such as replacing ASCII letters in the URL with identical-looking Cyrillic letters.

How to link

Links are made in the following wikimarkup 

a simple link,  and a link with text

The above example produces the following, a simple link, and a link with text The RFC mandated example.com website.

All text following a space is taken as the text to use for the link. Embedding wikilinks into the link text is incorrect, instead chose the appropriate words to link. Such as the following, "The RFC mandated example.com website".

External links section

There are two basic formats for external links. The most common is to add a list of external links at the end of an article. Put here, in list form, any web sites that you have used or recommend for readers of the article. The standard format for these is to have a level 2 header (i.e. == Header ==) named "External links" followed by a bullet list of links.

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. 

=== External links ===
* 
*

References and citation

Sites that have been used as references in the creation of an article should be linked to in a references section, not an external links section. See Misplaced Pages:Verifiability and Misplaced Pages:Citing sources for specific formating and linking guidelines for citations.

See also

For more detailed information regarding Misplaced Pages policy toward and appropriate syntax for external links, see:

Maintenance coordination
Misplaced Pages:External links Add topic