Wikipedia:WikiProject External links

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
 * to improve Wikipedia external links guidelines, in any way that helps better guide discussions of whether to include particular links or not
 * to recover or remove dead external links
 * quality control – keep lists of external links to a reasonable length and quality
 * to support WikiProject Spam in their combat against external linkspam
 * to attend to and sort out articles that have been flagged for external links cleanup

Related WikiProjects

 * WikiProject Spam
 * WikiProject Laundromat
 * WikiProject Fact and Reference Check

How to help
The best way to show your support is to participate! This, and adding 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 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.

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.

Others
This is a list of places you can look for articles that might require a cleanup.
 * Most referenced articles
 * Category:Wikipedia external links cleanup
 * Category:Articles_with_dead_external_links

Templates

 * – to use on articles that need work






 * {{subst:NoMoreLinks}} – a substituted template, visible only while editing


 * Refideas, external links moved to article talk page for future improvements




 * – a template to welcome new participants to the project

Userbox
Participants may add this userbox to their user page:

External watchlist

 * Wikiproject Watchlist – WikiProject External links