How to use links

The Truth Matters, Chapter 3

This is the third chapter of my book, The Truth Matters. Chapter one is here, chapter two is here.

Key points:

· Links are like footnotes—essential documentation for facts.

· Writers need to be more discerning about their use, help guide readers.

· The quality of a source needs evaluation before including a link.

It has long been recognized that documentation is essential for an argument to have credibility and therefore persuasiveness. The traditional method of documentation is the footnote. Not surprisingly, lawyers have long been its greatest fan; it’s not uncommon to read a law review article in which more than half of every page consists of footnotes with extremely detailed references.

Journalism never embraced the footnote, but historically journalists have attempted to provide some degree of documentation in the text of an article. The problem is that they are often loath to credit a competitor for documentation. It’s extremely rare for a Washington Post story to give credit to the New York Times for breaking a story or vice versa. A Post reporter may learn some important fact by reading the Times, but rather than repeat what the Times said, the Post reporter will call the same source and then pretend that this fact was independently acquired. There are many occasions when I was the source of some story and was forced to repeat myself over and over again just so a publication didn’t have to credit a competitor.

Another problem with journalistic documentation is that newspapers and magazines historically have been space-constrained. This often led them to be excessively vague about where certain information came from. A reporter may cite a “government study” without ever mentioning the author, the title, the agency that produced it or the date it appeared. I have spent a considerable amount of time over the years tracking down such studies to see if they have been accurately portrayed or if they contained important qualifications or additional information. Oftentimes, it was impossible even in the internet age, which made me doubt the validity of a news report.

One of the great innovations of the internet is the link, which theoretically solves the problem of documentation. A bit of text is highlighted and by clicking it the reader is taken to a source that documents some fact or quotation. Unfortunately, links have never proven to be as useful as they should be.

One problem is obviously that links are useless in print publications; you have to be reading online to use them. Another is that even after all these years, many readers appear systematically unwilling to click them on. Perhaps they have slow computer connections or don’t wish to be distracted. Whatever the reason, it constantly amazes me that people will demand that I provide documentation for something I wrote even though I provided a link that would have given them exactly what they wanted.

Many publishers have never embraced links, fearing that it will take readers away to other websites from which they may not return. And of course there has long been a problem with paywalls and registration requirements. Although most pay-walled publications will allow free access to a limited number of articles each month, there are many readers who resist registering to do so, perhaps fearful of getting a lot of spam in return. Link-rot, links that cease to work, is a constant problem.

The biggest problem I personally have with links is the lack of context when linking. The bit of text that is highlighted may not necessarily be relevant to what the link documents. Until you actually click on the link and see where it takes you, you have no way of knowing its usefulness or even its relevance. In the old days, a footnote was at the bottom of the page and you could satisfy your curiosity with a quick glance. Even if you never checked a reference, you could often determine its credibility by seeing whether the source was a known expert in the subject, whether it was published in a reputable journal and whether the source was contemporaneous in time.

A related problem is that writers are often very slipshod about the quality of the source to which they link. It is very frequently the case that a link takes me to a secondary source of dubious quality when it would have taken little additional effort for the writer to find and provide a primary source for the point being linked. I know that sometimes this is done because the primary source may be unwieldy or excessively dense. It’s a well-known problem that many people don’t like to read PDF (portable document format) documents because they require special software and may take considerable time to download. Personally, I like PDF files because they are easier to print and I find that the old-fashioned method of printing and filing documents is still the best way to save research.

It would help readers a great deal, I believe, if writers would take the time and effort to track down the best available source before linking and to think of links more as essential documentation than an FYI to the reader that simply clutters the text with extraneous material. In this respect, writers should say more in the text about the nature of their documentation. Instead of simply stating a fact and embedding a link, explain where the fact came from and say something about its nature. If it’s a government study, don’t just say “government study,” say, “According to a study published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the April 2017 issue of the Monthly Labor Review…” The goal should be to give enough information that someone could find the source relatively easily even if the link didn’t exist.

Because of link-rot, I find it is often better to link to a homepage whose address is unlikely to ever change and give people a title that can be searched. Or I may suggest a couple of words that can be put into a search engine that will take them to the source I am referencing. As with footnotes, making the effort to provide additional information to the reader greatly improves a writer’s credibility, makes it easier for readers to understand the basis for factual claims, and encourages people to use links as they were intended.

The potential for links is enormous in terms of helping to establish trust between a writer and the publication she writes for, on the one hand, and readers and news consumers, on the other. If people can see exactly where a fact came from and satisfy themselves that it is a primary source or a credible one, they will be more likely to believe that fact even if it runs counter to what they would prefer to believe for partisan or other reasons.

I wish some software developer would create a new type of link, one that is more like a footnote, where a writer can embed the sort of information typically found in a footnote, such as the author, title, publication, location and date of a source. People could satisfy their curiosity to some extent without having to click through but could do so if they want to, just as links do now. At present, a link just gives you a ULR (universal resource locator), which is like a mailing address; it tells you very little, sometimes nothing, about the nature of a source without clicking through.

In short, both readers and writers need to learn better how and when to use links. I consider them to be essential both as a reader and a writer. But they could be much more useful if everyone better understood how to use them.