Wikipedia:External links

This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia'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.

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[[:|WP:EL]]

Wikipedia is not a web directory. However, adding a certain number of external links is of valuable service to our readers. No page should consist solely of a collection of external links. Wikipedia always prefers internal links, even to non-existent articles, over external links. See also m:When should I link externally.

What to link to

In Wikipedia, it is possible to link to external websites. Such links are referred to 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?

What should be linked to

Articles about any organization, person, or other entity should link to their official site, if they have one.
Sites that have been cited or used as references in the creation of an article. Intellectual honesty requires that any site actually used as a reference be cited. See Wikipedia:Verifiability.
An article about a book, a musical score, a webcomic, a web site, or some other media, should link to the actual book, musical score, etc. if possible.
On articles with multiple Points of View, a link to sites dedicated to each, with a detailed explanation of each link. The number of links dedicated to one POV should not overwhelm the number dedicated to any other. One should attempt to add comments to these links informing the reader of their point of view.
Sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article. Ideally this content should be integrated into the Wikipedia article, then the link would remain as a reference.
Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as textbooks or reviews.

Maybe OK to add

For albums, movies, books: one or two links to professional reviews which express some sort of general sentiment. For films, Movie Review Query Engine, Internet Movie DataBase, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic offer especially large collections of reviews. To access the list of other collections of movie reviews available online, please use this link.
Web directories: When deemed appropriate by those contributing to an article on Wikipedia, a link to one web directory listing can be added, with preference to open directories (if two are comparable and only one is open). If deemed unnecessary, or if no good directory listing exists, one should not be included.
Fan sites: On articles about topics with many fansites, including a link to one major fansite is appropriate, marking the link as such. In extreme cases, a link to a web directory of fansites can replace this link.
Very large pages should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Worldwide, many users use Wikipedia with a low-speed connection. Unusually large pages should be annotated as such.
External sites may violate copyright: see Wikipedia:Copyrights#Linking to copyrighted works

What should not be linked to

In general, any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article here would have once it becomes an example of brilliant prose.
Links that are added to promote a site, by the site operator or its affiliates. See External link spamming.
Sites that primarily exist to sell products or services.
Sites with objectionable amounts of advertising
Sites that require payment to view the relevant content
Sites that require external applications (such as Flash or Java) to view the relevant content
Bookstores. Use the "ISBN" linking format which gives readers an opportunity to search a wide variety of free and non-free book sources.

What can be done with a dead external link

External links to dead URLs are of no use to Wikipedia articles. Such dead links should either be removed or updated with archived versions, which may be found at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Note that some dead links are caused by vandalism (for example, a vandal disabling links to products competing with vandal's favorite 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, e.g., replacing ASCII letters in the URL with identical-looking Cyrillic letters.

How to link

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 top level header named "External links" followed by a bullet list of links.

If an article has a large number of external links, it may be helpful to use subheaders to classify them. This can be done using another level of section heading, which will then appear in the table of contents, or with the "semi-colon" syntax, like this:

; External links
* [http://example.com/link_1 Link 1]
* [http://example.com/link_2 Link 2]

which yields:

External 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" vs "External link"

Some editors use the header "External link" if there is only one link, but others use "External links" in all cases. There is currently no consensus on which is better. Editors who always use the plural form may prefer it for any of the following reasons:

experience shows that future editors often add links without changing the section heading
people may be dissuaded from adding links to a section titled "External link" since it seems that there should only be one link
using "External links" gives greater stylistic consistency to Wikipedia

The converse arguments are:

Wikipedia's community-editing leads to prompt correction of such oversights.
There is no evidence that a significant number of people would be dissuaded from adding links. Besides, additional links would often be redundant.
Use of "External links" to head a section containing a single link is fundamentally incorrect, a poor precedent to set in an encyclopedia

Citations

The second format is for sentences or paragraphs that require specific references. This form of link can be placed in the body of an article at the end of the relevant sentence or paragraph. These links have no description other than an automatically generated number.

For example,

'''Frankton''' was one of the names considered for the state of Franklin. [http://www.next1000.com/family/GRUBB/sullivan.tenn.html]

would render something like

Frankton was one of the names considered for the state of Franklin. [1]

However, because links often die without warning, use of more complete citations are recommended.