User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

An External link in the Citizendium website is a hyperlink pointing to a specific resource (e.g., a page or document) in some other online website. Clicking on an external link connects you to that resource. Formatting an external link to a resource in another website is done by enclosing the URL of the resource in brackets and including an appropriate title for the resource. The title must be separated from the URL by a single space. Thus, the format coding is simply  [URL title].

For example, placing  EPA Organizational Structure  on the edit page of any article or any talk page will result in EPA Organizational Structure being displayed as a blue link in the article or talk page. Clicking on that blue link will take you to that resource on the website of the U.S. EPA.

Note that the URL in the above example is  http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/organization.html  and the resource title is EPA Organizational Structure, and they are separated by a single blank space. Except in some special circumstances, a bare URL (without an appropriate title) should not be used as an external link.

The difference between external and internal links
As explained above, an external link points to a resource on some other website. An internal link is a hyperlink that points to a resource located elsewhere in Citizendium and is often referred to as a wiki link. Internal links are formatted differently than external links (see Help:Index/Formatting/Links/Internal for how to format internal links.) For example, the blue U.S. EPA link in the above introductory section is an internal link that take you an article elsewhere in Citizendium.

Using external links as embedded, inline references
External links may be used as embedded, inline references or footnotes as explained in much more detail at Help:Index/Formatting/References. Embedded inline references are references that corroborate a specific word, statement, paragraph or even sub-section of an article by providing the readers of the article with the details of a book, journal, newspaper report or online website page that substantiates and validates the word, statement, paragraph or sub-section.

Figure 1below illustrates how external links used as embedded, inline references are displayed on the "References" section at the end of Citizendium articles.

As an example of an external link used as an embedded, inline reference, placing this on the edit page of an article at its proper point of insertion:

produces reference 3 as displayed in the example "References" section depicted in Figure 1. Note that the above formatting first has a tag. Also note that the external link enclosed in square brackets includes the URL of the resource reference, followed by a single blank space and then the title "A Biographical Memoir of Vladimir Haensel", just as discussed above in the introductory section.

As another example, placing this on the edit page of an article at its proper point of insertion:

produces reference 4 as displayed in the example "References" section depicted in Figure 1. Note that in this example, the references does not include any annotation since the title of the source reference is essentially self-explanatory.

"External Links" subpages
External links that are not used as corroboration for some part of an article, but do contain interesting material relative to an article in general, are placed in the "External Links" subpage of the article.

Figure 2 below illustrates how external links are displayed in the "External Links" subpage of a Citizendium article when stored in that subpage:

For example,