Apologies for resurrecting an old thread; however, a current discussion amongst several Wikipedians indicates how very important those external link symbols are. It's really important for external links to be easily and visually differentiated from internal links because we have an awful lot of examples of external links being used for less-than-straightforward purposes.
We know of many cases where external links were used as honeypots to gather IP data of those who click them. We know of many that are NSFW or otherwise inappropriate but are disguised by piped links. We know of many cases where malware was used in external links. Remember that a significant percentage of external links are included on pages that are *not* article pages, and thus would never go in an "external links" section. Just as notably, none of our projects is in the position to totally curate all article pages, and it's common to find external links in the body of articles.
Indeed, many websites don't automatically send someone to the external site, they add a step where the user has to confirm that they know and are okay with going to the third-party site. I'm not sure we need to do that on WMF projects, but I think sometimes in trying to "beautify" the site, we forget the underlying purpose of some of our practices.
Risker
On 29 October 2013 13:51, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
- wikitech
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) < smazeland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Also see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/23424/
In my opinion, external link icons add a lot of visual noise and not that much relevant information.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Changed subject to reflect this change in topic. Also cc'ing design mailing list.
In terms of external links to me I don't care about whether I'm leaving the site or not. If I clicked on something and it wasn't what I expected that's a badly labeled link. A link saying there is more information on
the
[white house official website] and a link to the word [house] should be enough information to tell which I'd external and which isn't.
I actually think the only place an icon next to a link really makes
sense
is for downloads. Clicking something that downloads a PDF when I
thought it
was a web page is a little confusing (on mobile at least).
That said if all the external links are in the external links / references section wouldn't encouraging that organisation of links be better....?
Also I agree with Juliusz that we shouldn't force behaviour of where links open. It should be up to the user if they want the same tab or new one and it should be configurable within the browser preferences. On 24 Oct 2013 16:07, "Juliusz Gonera" jgonera@wikimedia.org wrote:
No, we should definitely not warn people, that's just weird ;) It's not like something bad is about to happen. I'm also not saying that users have the expectation that links point to local URLs, I'm only saying that it might be a useful piece of
information
to some.
On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
Its definitely a less heavy handed way of doing the thing many (annoying) sites do when they warn you that you're leaving their site.
I
just wonder is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know that
modern
web users have any expectations that link within a site always point to local site urls.
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