CZ:External Links
What are Links pages?
Links pages list useful websites on a topic, divided into a variety of categories of types of information. They are guides to the best of the Web about a topic.
Purpose
It is useful to have relevant and trustworthy links on a specific topic gathered in one place. Particularly if the links are vetted by experts, this achieves something that search engines cannot: 100% relevance and superlative reliability.
Heading and format standards
Guidelines for editing
Maintaining high link reliability
The most important rule to bear in mind in constructing Links pages is: is this information reliable? What distinguishes the Citizendium, its very reason for existence, is the aggregation of reliable reference material. Amateurs who understand the basic standards of finding an expert-vetted source can link to those sources. But websites that are written or edited by amateurs cannot be linked-to except by an expert who vouches for its reliability.
While we should be remain grateful to people adding information to the Citizendium, we should also, with a respectful explanation, remove links to unedited, amateur-created, and other websites unless those links were placed on the Links page by a editor in the relevant field, or by another person who is known to be an expert about the topic.
No self-promotion
You may not add links to websites you own, manage, or are otherwise closely associated with. See Policy on Self-Promotion.
Keeping links fresh
If you are a programmer, then consider writing a "bot" that will check our links. Basically, it should check the links on each Citizendium Links page on a monthly basis (but not all at once). If a link is unreachable, then it should be commented out (not deleted), and the Links page added to Category:Link Check.
After this bot is written and running, then we should do three things as needed:
- Double-check to make sure the commented-out links are no longer working; note that they might have been only temporarily unreachable, or they might simply have been moved to a different URL; often, you should look at the root URL (for example, http://en.citizendium.org instead of http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Links) and see if you can locate the page from there, using Google's "Search Current Site" feature.
- Delete the links that really have disappeared, or if they have moved, change the links, and remove the comment-out code.
- Remove Category:Link Check from the page.
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