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External links and references are two important elements of Wikipedia that newcomers sometimes find trouble with. This page is designed to cover only the technical aspects of linking and referencing; it is essential that editors also familiarize themselves with Wikipedia:External links, Wikipedia:Reliable sources and Wikipedia:Citing sources, as well as Wikipedia's various other policies ...
Note that the standards for WP:External links and WP:Reliable sources are different, so that a web page might be acceptable as an external link, but not as a reliable source, or vice versa. Also note that this page does not prescribe any recommendations of what action to take if one encounters any of these sites linked within articles.
A secondary source contrasts with a primary, or original, source of the information being discussed. A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or it may be a document created by such a person. A secondary source is one that gives information about a primary source.
Rather, link to the particular article which is relevant. There is absolutely no need to link every national or state regulatory body for a regulated chemical. Instead, use them as inline references in the body of the article, if necessary. A certain number of frequently used sites have their own templates for the external link.
A citation ideally includes a link or ID number to help editors locate the source. If you have a URL (web page) link, you can add it to the title part of the citation, so that when you add the citation to Wikipedia the URL becomes hidden and the title becomes clickable.
Prefer secondary sources – Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a paper reviewing existing research, a review article, monograph, or textbook is often better than a primary research paper. When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised.
Whether a source is primary, secondary or tertiary can depend on the topic that an article is covering. For example, the summary for policy makers from the IPCC is a secondary source for the article Global warming but it would be a primary source if used for the article Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Similarly, a book review in a ...
Secondary sources are accounts at least one step removed from an event or body of primary-source material and may include an interpretation, analysis, or synthetic claims about the subject. [2] Secondary sources may draw on primary sources and other secondary sources to create a general overview; or to make analytic or synthetic claims. [3] [4]