Add an External Link

External Links are used to provide additional information, context, or citation to a wiki article. Here we talk about when to use external links, and how to add an External Link to a page.

Clicking on an external link should never be necessary to understanding the wiki article you are writing. Include important information in the page, and if comparable in-wiki resources exist use the in-wiki resources over external ones.

If the in-wiki resources are not adequate, it might be a sign that a new page is needed.

Below we walk you through three links. Though the contexts are different, the format is the same.

Be sure to do cases two and three, as you need to add these links to participate in the Happening.

First let's do what you will be doing most of the time, adding an external link as a reference, citation, or pointer to further information.

Go to the encyclopedic page you created a couple steps ago. Find a paragraph in it. If you want to be all fancy, locate a useful external reference for the paragraph, and copy the URL. If not, just practice this by linking to http://cnn.com or something.

Here's what your link will look like ext to the paragraph it supports (ignore the coloring, the code object is the best way to show this at the moment, but doesn't understand the format).

Notice it has three parts. The paragraph, the URL, and a Link Word. The paragraph makes the content of the link clear. The URL opens in a new tab. The Link Word tells the user what format to expect.

This is what that paragraph will look like.

Imagined by Vannevar Bush in "As We May Think," in 1945, the Memex is a desk-sized scholar workstation containing a microfilm library. Text and images are displayed on two screens, and can be annotated by hand. html

Be sure to edit the text of the paragraph in such a way that the reader has some idea of what the link might go to. Here the reader can assume the link will go to a more in-depth description of the device or the Bush article itself.

By convention, external links are NEVER linked like this in the middle of a paragraph by hotlinking a word. We reserve that treatment for internal links only. See Link Word

Next we're going to add a link on your homepage to our Conversation Clubs page. This page helps you see activity across the Happening.

Find the Related Sites heading on your Welcome Visitors page.

Double click into that get to the end of the line and hit your Enter key. Type

Again, there's the paragraph, the URL, and the type of page to which it links.

(If you want to play with Conversation CLubs for a bit, you can. It won't break anything.)

This one's a bit exotic, but we might as well get it done.

Navigate back to your Welcome Visitors page, either by using the arrow keys, clicking on it, or going to the root URL of your site.

Open up a new paragraph for editing right above your journal and type exactly this:

This link will get you a JSON file with the entire contents of you site in it.