Not surprised at all by this. My site has a lot of contributors who have little to no experience on the web, and they often ask me if it's ok to include links

Not surprised at all by this. My site has a lot of contributors who have little to no experience on the web, and they often ask me if it's ok to include links to other web sites in their stories or encourage me to stop linking out to other sites so much. I tell them it's ok and actually important to send folks to relevant sites, but it seems a bit counter intuitive to some.