 | This page is part of the Military history WikiProject's online Academy, and contains instructions, recommendations, or suggestions for editors working on military history articles. While it is not one of the project's formal guidelines, editors are encouraged to consider the advice presented here in the course of their editing work. |
As the internet keeps growing, so does the amount of information on it that can be used to cite articles on Wikipedia. An external link to a reliable source can be an irreplaceable source of information when composing an article.
External links to off-site websites are advantageous to our project because they allow anyone viewing a page easy access to see the information used to develop an article, whereas books, magazines, journals, and other published material may not be so easily accessed and in some cases may not be within a reader's capacity to obtain. The downside is that external links to websites have a tendency to change over time, and in changing they may no longer display any useful information, or in a worst-case scenario may be simply be "dead" with a 404 error. When this happens, it can affect the verification of the information in articles as well as an article's rating on the assessment scale.