On Jan 9, 2004, at 10:36 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Graham Burnett wrote:
"External links within the article are
against wiki policy."
Earlier today I used external links in an article, but I didn't
really like it. And I found myself doing something really bad --
but I caught myself.
I wrote something like...
In [
http://www.whatever.com/ this article], so-and-so says
such-and-such.
that's really bad because when the content is repurposed, that sentence
will make no sense at all.
Sure, but "So-and-so says such-and-such [
http://www.whatever.com/]."
will make perfect sense once it's been repurposed. Citation-type links
are parenthetical and can simply be removed; the content just loses a
little credibility. If any information about the context of the
referenced material is useful to the reader of the article (who wrote
it, where it was published, etc.), this information ought to be in the
article anyway. Readers should not be expected to follow the link to
understand the reference, only for the full story.
When such content is repurposed it may be appropriate to move this link
to an equivalent of an "External links" section, but this can be done
without garbling the text. Putting it there on the wiki version just
makes the context of the reference unclear and confuses the reader.
Peter
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