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For a while now, there’s been a feature on WhatDoTheyKnow that lets you link your Freedom of Information requests to news articles, campaigning pieces or research papers.

We’ve recently made it easier to link your batch requests to these types of stories in the same way. 

To celebrate, we’ll be offering free credit for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro subscribers who add links from their batch requests to the stories or papers that the requests have fed into.

For each qualifying link added during August, we’ll credit your account with a coupon that gives you a 20% discount on one month of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro. 

Add several links, and you’ll get several coupons — so you could be enjoying that 20% discount for many months to come.

It’s easy to add them – go to the batch request via the dashboard and you’ll find the section in the right hand column. Just click on ‘Let us know’:

…and paste the URL in:

If there’s more than one story, you can click ‘New citation’ to add another one.

You’ll then see all the links to sources where the requests have been cited:

They’ll also be shown on the pages for individual requests in the batch:

If you’re a journalist, campaigner or researcher, we hope this is a useful way to give your stories some more readership (not to mention a nice inbound link from a high-ranked site for your search engine ratings).

More broadly, when you use this feature you’ll be helping us to understand what sort of impact the site is having, too. We’re always keen to spot news stories based on WhatDoTheyKnow requests, but papers don’t always cite a source or link back to the site, meaning that our monitoring is often dependent on a manual search where stories look like they might have originated with one of our users.

The way we’ve set this feature up, WhatDoTheyKnow users can add a citation to any of their own requests — but if you spot a news story that’s linked to a request that isn’t yours, please do contact the WhatDotheyKnow team.

They’ll assess it and input it if they find it to be valid. Our aim here is, of course, to prevent spammers from adding irrelevant links to the site.

Users of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, on the other hand, have the ability to add citations to any request.

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For a link to qualify for the discount, it needs to be a link to a specific story, report, paper or dataset where the information released in the FOI request has been used (ie not just a link to your organisation’s homepage, or a general overview of a campaign – though we’re always delighted to hear about these cases, too!). 

We’ll cap the number of months on which you can claim a discount at 24, but we really do appreciate these links so please do add them even if it’s above the cap. We’ll apply coupons to any qualifying links at the end of the month.

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Image: Etienne Girardet