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OverlinkingOverlinking in a webpage or another hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks. It particularly tends to be a problem with wikitext. It is characterised by: - A large proportion of the words in each sentence being rendered as links.
- Links that have little or nothing to do with the subject.
- Links that lead to places that a reader is unlikely to be interested in going.
The problem is that writers will often believe that the text is improved by any addition of links, while in fact useless links make the useful links less prominent and therefore less useful, and may distract in other ways as well depending on the formatting of the page. Common nouns or words which need no definition or expansion may still be suitable candidates for links. Deciding which links are useful is often more an art than a science, and opinions differ. In Wikipedia, a rule of thumb is that an article may be considered overlinked if any of the following is true: - 10% or more of the words are contained in links.
- The article has more links than lines.
- A link is repeated within the same screen (40 lines perhaps).
- More than 10% of the links are to articles that don't exist.
Two of these criteria depend on the browser settings of the reader, which demonstrates how difficult it is to set a useful standard for the boundary between good linking and overlinking, even for relatively similar pages such as encyclopedia articles. Overlinking rules do not apply to some categories of pages or sections, such as lists or formal definitions.
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