Template:External media/doc

If an image, audio or video clip is available online, but cannot be uploaded to Wikipedia, it may be appropriate to use external media to provide a direct link to the file and a (referenced) description of what it contains.

external media should be removed as soon as an adequate replacement is available in WP:COMMONS. It is not adequate if the file in Commons is not of sufficient quality or accuracy.

external media can be used multiple times in an article, and each instance can be used to link to more than one file.

Copyright: according to WP:ELNEVER you're discouraged from linking to content that violates copyright. In case there can be doubt about the copyright (for example with links to youtube), make it clear in the template or in the reference that you link to material from a rightful distributor (examples can be found at grindcore).

Legend
Note: when adding a link to an external media source like this, it is essential that the source page be linked too with the date of retrieval, both to satisfy Wikipedia's sourcing criteria for the statement about the presented media and to ensure that the link can quickly be corrected should the source URL be changed. Reference tags can be used for this purpose. It's polite if you inform the administrator of the page you link to that you are deep linking to the content of his page, marking it as an external source, also providing a link to his complete page and that if he doesn't like it he can use a script to disable deep linking.
 * align: Valid options are "left", "right" and "center". The template defaults to displaying on the right-hand-side.
 * width: This should be a complete width measurement including units. Examples: 300px, 22em, 30%. The template defaults to 258px wide.
 * media links: Each file to be linked should specify its type and have a different number, starting from 1. For example, a template containing four images and one video would label them as image1, image2, image3, image4 and video1. The attribute has a free format, so any amount of detail may be added. The first part of the entry should be formatted as a normal external link, i.e.  Image description </tt> for Image description. After that, any additional detail can be given on the same line. See the examples for details.

Examples
Just an image, taken from the War against Nabis Featured Article. This example gives full contextual information along with references.

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">

Image, using descriptive text with accompanying reference:

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">

Two images with rich accompanying text, floated left:

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">

audio with topic text and accompanying link to the home page:

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">

Single video, floated left:

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">

Mixed content:

<pre style="width:50%; overflow: auto">