Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
External links and references are two important elements of Wikipedia that newcomers sometimes find trouble with. This page is designed to cover only the technical aspects of linking and referencing; it is essential that editors also familiarize themselves with Wikipedia:External links, Wikipedia:Reliable sources and Wikipedia:Citing sources, as well as Wikipedia's various other policies ...
External links use URLs to link directly to any web page. External links are enclosed in single square brackets (rather than double brackets as with internal links), with the optional link text separated from the URL by a space (not a "|" as with internal links). When rendered, external links are followed by an external link icon. For example,
Linking through hyperlinks is an important feature of Wikipedia. Internal links bind the project together into an interconnected whole. Interwikimedia links bind the project to sister projects such as Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikipedia in other languages, and external links bind Wikipedia to the World Wide Web.
[b] Instead, include appropriate external links in an "External links" section at the end of the article, and in the appropriate location within an infobox, if applicable. Links in the "External links" section should be kept to a minimum. A lack of external links or a small number of external links is not a reason to add external links.
A link relation is a descriptive attribute attached to a hyperlink in order to define the type of the link, or the relationship between the source and destination resources. The attribute can be used by automated systems, or can be presented to a user in a different way. In HTML these are designated with the rel attribute on link, a, or area ...
You can also insert them by clicking the icon. If you want to link to an article, but display some other text for the link, you can use a pipe | divider (⇧ Shift+\): [[target page|display text]] You can also link to a specific section of a page using a hash #: [[Target page#Target section|display text]] Here are some examples:
You can "deep link" to a section of an article (or other Wikipedia page), using a hash character (#), then the section's title, with underscore characters (_) replacing spaces.
However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. This is done using external link syntax. There are three forms of external link syntax: