Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Are external link icons useful

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: