BBC News is trialling links within the body of its online news stories.
When clicked, the 'in-page links' direct users to background information from across the BBC News site related to the highlighted word or phrase.
Links to social media sites, including YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr, and external news and organisations' sites are also included in the trial, which can currently be switched on and off on the featured articles.
External links are identified by different symbols and open up a separate window previewing the linked-to page.
"We wanted to include these sources because they promote sharing of
content, have a huge array of material of potential editorial
relevance, are technically easy to work with and also we wanted to
gauge your thoughts about us linking to these user-generated sources," said Steve Herrmann, BBC News website editor, in a post to the BBC Editors' blog
"We're not taking an exclusive approach to which sources we link to,
the whole idea is to try out and develop a system that is flexible
enough for pretty much anything."
The trial will last for four weeks and is currently only available on the UK site, Herrmann added.
The system has been developed in partnership with multimedia technology firm Apture, which has implemented a similar feature on the news pages of WashingtonPost.com.
In its review of bbc.co.uk in June, the BBC Trust said it was 'disappointed' with the click-through rate for the site's links to external sites and asked the corporation to improve this service to users.