Battles of Cabin Creek


WikiProject External links

Project


How to help
Introduce yourself
Tasks you can do
Add a task

Editor resources


External links
Dead external links
Spam
Wikipedia is not a link repository
Citing sources
Using the Wayback Machine
Articles with dead external links

Tools


Templates
Special:Linksearch
Bots
Userbox
Link checker
Wayback Machine

Discussion pages


Project discussion
Policy discussion
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Articles


Deep linking
Dead link
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( · changes)

Welcome to the External links WikiProject, a project dedicated to cleaning up overly long lists of external links and having articles conform to Wikipedia's external links guidelines! We're a relatively small WikiProject, and so we could always use some help. Feel free to sign up and help us out!

Scope

The goals of this WikiProject are

Related WikiProjects

How to help

The best way to show your support is to participate! This, and adding {{Wikipedia:WikiProject External links/Userbox}} to your userpage allows users to identify you as someone who helps out here, and gain some attention for the project so that others can help out, too.

Spam

Be on constant lookout for "linkspam" and adherence to the Wikipedia External links policy by keeping an eye on watchlist articles and Wikipedia:Most vandalized pages. Articles that need work can also be found by looking at random articles.

In some cases it's clear which links are 'spam', while other times it is important to defer to the content/topic experts to help discern which links are informative and useful. This could be done by copying the external links to the talk page for discussion, and for voting keep, delete, or give comments. This is particularly important for controversial topics such as Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dead links

Many dead links are tagged with a {{dead link}} template. To see a list of articles with dead links, by date, go here. There are many ways to fix them. One way is to find a copy on the Internet Archive. Do this by typing web.archive.org/web/*/ in front of the dead link. The page will display a list of archived versions of that link. Choose one that was archived closest to when your dead link was accessed (i.e. "accessdate = ...").

A useful tool to find, fix, and tag dead links is User:Dispenser/Checklinks.

Before working on this maintenance task, it is useful to read WP:DEADLINK to see how to repair deadlinks, and WP:DEADREF to understand what policy says to do with them.

In general: Do not delete a citation merely because the URL is not working. For many citations (including print sources), the reference material still exists, and can still easily be found by its title, author, publisher and other metadata. Dead links should be repaired or replaced if possible, using the steps outlined at WP:DEADLINK and WP:DEADREF.

See also

Articles that need external links cleanup

This is a short list of articles that have an excessive external links section, and might require a clean up.

WikiProject External links
Open Tasks:
  • Fix the broken links in the Featured Articles using the Checklinks tool
  • Intelligent vehicle technologies (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - Looking for a third opinion on some of the links in the article that appear to be commercial firms. Trying to avoid an edit war.
  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) There has been a long debate on external links to be included, third opinions invited in particular for the forum websites referenced that may be useful but are not discussed in the main article.
  • Extreme pornography (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) This is about the term being used by the UK's Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 but is obviously a controversial topic with a number of arguably useful pornographic example links added
  • 2009 swine flu pandemic (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) As a hot news topic this article can suffer from excessive links from dubious un-official sources
  • Model_View_ViewModel (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) The Open source MVVM frameworks section contains links to several products that would fail notability as having no coverage in independent sources, e.g. Mugen MVVM Toolkit. Is this linkspam? - Pointillist (talk) 09:28, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Others

This is a list of places you can look for articles that might require a cleanup.

Templates

WikiProject iconExternal links
WikiProject iconWikipedia:WikiProject External links's list of external links is being reviewed as part of WikiProject External links — a quality control effort aimed at keeping the number of links to a reasonable length, and in compliance with Wikipedia External links guidelines. Wikipedia is NOT a link repository.
WikiProject External links tasks you can do:
WikiProject External links
Open Tasks:
  • Fix the broken links in the Featured Articles using the Checklinks tool
  • Intelligent vehicle technologies (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - Looking for a third opinion on some of the links in the article that appear to be commercial firms. Trying to avoid an edit war.
  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) There has been a long debate on external links to be included, third opinions invited in particular for the forum websites referenced that may be useful but are not discussed in the main article.
  • Extreme pornography (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) This is about the term being used by the UK's Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 but is obviously a controversial topic with a number of arguably useful pornographic example links added
  • 2009 swine flu pandemic (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) As a hot news topic this article can suffer from excessive links from dubious un-official sources
  • Model_View_ViewModel (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) The Open source MVVM frameworks section contains links to several products that would fail notability as having no coverage in independent sources, e.g. Mugen MVVM Toolkit. Is this linkspam? - Pointillist (talk) 09:28, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
<!--===========================({{NoMoreLinks}})===============================-->
<!--| DO NOT ADD MORE LINKS TO THIS ARTICLE. WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A COLLECTION OF |-->
<!--| LINKS. If you think that your link might be useful, do not add it here, |-->
<!--| but put it on this article's discussion page first or submit your link  |-->
<!--| to the appropriate category at the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org)|-->
<!--| and link back to that category using the {{dmoz}} template.             |-->
<!--|                                                                         |-->
<!--|           Links that have not been verified WILL BE DELETED.            |-->
<!--|  See [[Wikipedia:External links]] and [[Wikipedia:Spam]] for details    |-->
<!--===========================({{NoMoreLinks}})===============================-->
  • {{Refideas}}, external links moved to article talk page for future improvements
Thank you for joining WikiProject External links, a collaborative effort to have articles comply with Wikipedia's External links guidelines. Below are some ongoing tasks for you to take part in, or you can add a task to do. Another great place to check out is Category:Wikipedia external links cleanup. Happy editing, ~~~~
WikiProject External links tasks you can do:
WikiProject External links
Open Tasks:
  • Fix the broken links in the Featured Articles using the Checklinks tool
  • Intelligent vehicle technologies (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) - Looking for a third opinion on some of the links in the article that appear to be commercial firms. Trying to avoid an edit war.
  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) There has been a long debate on external links to be included, third opinions invited in particular for the forum websites referenced that may be useful but are not discussed in the main article.
  • Extreme pornography (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) This is about the term being used by the UK's Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 but is obviously a controversial topic with a number of arguably useful pornographic example links added
  • 2009 swine flu pandemic (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) As a hot news topic this article can suffer from excessive links from dubious un-official sources
  • Model_View_ViewModel (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) The Open source MVVM frameworks section contains links to several products that would fail notability as having no coverage in independent sources, e.g. Mugen MVVM Toolkit. Is this linkspam? - Pointillist (talk) 09:28, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Userbox

Participants may add this userbox to their user page: {{Wikipedia:WikiProject External links/Userbox}}

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{{Wikipedia:WikiProject External links/Userbox}}
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You can help!

See also

External watchlist