: Re: How to include external references when writing internal documentation? In the IT industry, we often write a lot of technical documentation meant for internal use only. Those documents are often

@Caterina108

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I like Monica's answer -- my answer here is about how to be sure these links are still viable in the future.

If others are also making the documents, I encourage "casual citation", so there's not the stress of Proper Bibliographic Formatting, but as long as the URL is there, then readers can get to where the writer went.

To be sure that it's still there in the future, I often advised them also to go to the WayBack Machine on Archive.org, and there's an option there to manually copy archive that specific page.

For my classes, I'd often do the archive.org thing, then feed that longer link into TinyURL, so I'd have a shorter (though less identifiable) link to put on our resources, and it would show the version of the site/exercise that I planned for.

(This won't work at my workplace -- archive.org is blocked! but in most of the world, it should be fine. And it's not proof against robots.txt exclusions, which means the page won't be on archive.org.)

I do typically like to have a Visible Link, with the URL spelled out in case there's an error or change. If I copied an extra space into the link, someone can easily copy it. If the site did a redesign, with the original page title, it's a lot easier to search.

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