External links

Offline MediaWiki Code Editor

External Links
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For internal links see: Internal links
External links are links to internet pages which not belong to any of the Wikimedia projects. Those links point to the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the destination page with the HTML scheme, that is, beginning the addresses with http:// or https:// which is the scheme accepted by all browsers. Do not use other schemes like  ftp:// , news:// or mailto://  for external links.
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A tool to insert external links into pages

Some characters appearing in the URL's do not work well in links, unless those are substituted by its percent code. The most common is the white space, which is substituted by the code %20. In such cases it might be necessary to substitute manually the character by its percent code:
space
%20
"
%22
'
%27
,
%2c
;
%3b
<
%3c
>
%3e
?
%3f
[
%5b
]
%5d


If you want to display an URL with link

If you want to display an URL with a link, you had better use the assistant which allows to create a formatted external link of a displayed URL.

The assistant is quite similar, but the code generated and the results are rather different. This kind of link is based on the template {{URL}}. See templates.
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Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia (external links), but they should not normally be placed in the body of an article. All external links must conform to certain formatting restrictions.

Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on- topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy.

Some external links are welcome, but it is not Wikipedia's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic. No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justifiable and common sense. The burden of providing this justification is on the person who wants to include an external link.


Besides those kinds of links, these external-link guidelines do not apply to citations to reliable sources within the body of the article.


If the website or page to which you want to link includes information that is not yet a part of the article, consider using it as a source for the article, and citing it.