Help:Links

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There are four different kinds of links you might want to insert in an article you're creating or editing:

• Internal links, also known as wiki-links. These are links to other articles on Judgepedia. When you read a JP article and see words in it that are blue, that's an internal, or wiki-link.
• External links. These are links to other websites, or pages on other websites. These links also appear in blue, and can be distinguished from an internal link by the presence of an arrow. Here's an example.
• Reference or citation links. These are links to other websites, formatted in a particular way.^[1]
• Inter-wiki links. These are links to other wikis that are a hybrid of an internal and an external link. These links have the appearance of an internal link--they are blue with no arrow--but if you click on them, you are taken to a different website--a website that Judgepedia is set up to "inter-wiki" link to.

Internal links (wiki-links)

You can link to other pages within Judgepedia (for example, the Main Page) by placing double brackets around the name of the article on Judgepedia you want to link to from the page you're currently editing, in this fashion: ([[ ]]). Be sure to put the exact title of the other Judgepedia article you're linking to, including the exact capitalization of that article; otherwise, your link won't work.

Putting a link on one Judgepedia page to another JP page is known as "wiki-linking". If I put a link here to the Judgepedia Wikiteer article--like I just did--you would say that I had "wiki-linked to the Wikiteer article".

The "pipe"

If you want to use text to describe the name of the other JP article you're directing people to other than its title, the way to do that is to add a pipe symbol ( | ) after the title of the JP article you're linking to and then type however you want to describe that article.

(Note: The pipe, or "|" symbol, is usually located on your computer keyboard on the key under your backspace key.)

• For example:[[History of the Supreme Court|John Marshall]]

• Which will appear as this on the finished article: John Marshall

Linking to categories

There may be times when you want to refer to, or link to, a Judgepedia category in an article, but not in such a way as to assign the article to that category. For example, you may be writing an article about partisan election of judges and you want to link, in that article, to all the Judgepedia articles about the 2008 state supreme court elections.

The way to do this is by inserting ":" as in this example:

• Category:Federal judiciary.

You can insert any wiki-link you wish, as in this example:

• [[:Category:Federal judiciary|federal judges]], which looks like:

• federal judges.

Links to subsections

You can link directly to a subsection of an article rather than just to the article.

For example, consider the article on the Alaska Supreme Court. It has a section called "The court's justices". While writing another article on JP, you might want to send your readers directly to that particular section of the article on the Alaska Supreme Court.

Here's how to do that:

• [[Alaska Supreme Court#The court's justices|Current justices of the Alaska Supreme Court]].
• Here's how that looks: Current justices of the Alaska Supreme Court.
• Note that I could have put any words after the pipe ( | ) in this example. The key thing is to include the hash tag ( # ) after the name of the article, and before the name of the specific subsection you wish to link to.

External links

To link to a website outside of Judgepedia, you can just type out its URL; for example: http://www.google.com.

Stylistically, it is preferred if you attach that URL to a clickable word that describes the website you're linking to. To do that, surround the URL with single brackets ([ ]), insert a space, and then type the word(s) you want to show as the link: Google Search

When you insert such an external link, a little arrow pops up after your external link. That little arrow is how you (and readers) can tell the difference between an internal link and an external link.

Inter-wiki linking

You can also place links on a Judgepedia article to articles on Wikipedia and to articles on Judgepedia's sister projects, Ballotpedia and Sunshine Review. This is known as "inter-wiki linking".

The way to insert a link on a JP article to an article on Wikipedia, Ballotpedia or Sunshine Review is as in these examples:

• [[Wikipedia:Georgia|Georgia]], which looks on the saved page as Georgia.

• [[Ballotpedia:Laws governing the initiative process in Ohio|Laws governing the initiative process in Ohio]], which looks on the saved page as Laws governing the initiative process in Ohio.

• [[Sunshinereview:Los Angeles County, California|Los Angeles County, California]], which looks on the saved page as Los Angeles County, California.

Reference/citation links

Your article will generally include links to outside resources, done as footnotes. This section explains how to create footnotes and citations on an article using
the <ref> ... </ref> and {{reflist}} format. Adding footnotes and citations to your article allows readers to understand what the basis or source is for content in the article.

Single citation

At the point in the main text where you want your footnote to be inserted, type this:

<ref>Sacramento Bee, March 24, 2008</ref>

That lets the reader know that the fact you just asserted is based on something published in the Sacramento Bee (a California newspaper) on March 24, 2008. However, you'll usually want to be more specific, and include a link in your footnote to the specific article in the Sacramento Bee upon which you are relying.

The text included between the ref tags does not need to refer the reader to an outside source.^[2]

Link to specific URL

In order to include a link in your footnote to a specific URL, type this:

<ref>[http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/806578.html ''Sacramento Bee'': "Low turnout expected in California's June primary," March 24, 2008]</ref>

Here's what that looks like as an actual footnote.^[3]

Multiple citations

To cite the same reference or footnote several times in the same article, identify it the first time you type it with a short name, using the <ref> tag.

Enter the name of the reference like this:

<ref name="Sacramento Bee">[http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/806578.html ''Sacramento Bee'': "Low turnout expected in California's June primary," March 24, 2008]</ref>

Then, at all the other places in the article where you wish to cite that particular reference again, just enter:

<ref name="Sacramento Bee"/>

How does that look in practice?^[3]

The reference list

At the place in the article where you wish the footnotes themselves to appear (usually at the end of the article in a section labelled "References", insert the tag:

{{reflist}}

If you don't insert this tag, none of the references you have so carefully included in your article will be visible to the article's readers.

Citation conventions

See Help:Citation conventions for discussion of the preferred citation formats on Judgepedia.

References

Acknowledgement

• The Help/Footnotes article from Wikipedia

References (example)