Hi comrade,

First of all, thank you for your many edits on ProleWiki so far.

I noticed that you replaced red links with external links, many of which pointing to Wikipedia, on various articles.

I wanted to bring this up to you to explain our usual process as well as why we don't like to link to Wikipedia. For transparency reasons, please be aware I've rolled back your edits that added external links (as you will probably see in the recent changes page).

The first problem is with Wikipedia itself. It's an anti-communist encyclopedia that we don't hold in high regard on prolewiki; i.e. our Wikipedia page which is not very kind to them (and for good reason). If we start linking our readers to wikipedia on the one hand, while criticizing them on the other, we send out mixed messages about our stance and principles.

External links should more readily be included as sources if necessary. To add a source on the visual editor, you can click on the Cite button at the top of the page and choose the template -- we have three so far (book, website, youtube video). It's also possible to use notes to define terms, although they're a bit unwieldy to use (you would write your note between a ^{[note 1]} tag, then add a References list at the end of the page, click on it, click edit, then type "note" as the group if that makes sense).

While red links are a bit of a problem as they link to a page that does not exist, they also serve a purpose as they indicate which pages are wanted. You can see wanted pages hereSpecial:WantedPages, essentially the more a non-existent page is linked on the wiki, the higher it shows up there.

The best practice therefore would be to create a page to fill a red link if it doesn't exist. Until you get the Trusted role to create pages of your own, you can ask any trusted editor to create a page for you if you'd like to write it.

We remain available if you have any questions or need any help to use MediaWiki, it's a difficult tool to get started with!

↑ NOTE HERE