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.
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.
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.
