Difference between revisions of "Links"

Latest revision as of 23:16, 19 May 2014

There are five types of links in MediaWiki:

1. Internal links to other pages in the wiki
2. External links to other websites
3. External links to internal pages in the wiki
4. Interwiki links to other websites registered to the wiki in advance
5. Interlanguage links to other websites registered as other language versions of the wiki

Internal links

To add an internal link, enclose the name of the page you want to link to in double square brackets. When you save the page, you'll see the new link pointing to your page. If the page exists already it is displayed in blue, if it does not, in red. Selflinks to the current page are not transformed in URLs but displayed in bold. (If you really want to link to the current page, use an anchor (see below), or [[#top|current page]] which always links to the top.)

The first letter of the target page is automatically capitalized, unless otherwise set by the admins, and spaces are represented as underscores (typing an underscore in the link will have a similar effect as typing a space, but is not recommended, since the underscore will also be shown in the text).

[[Main Page]]

[[Help:Contents]]

[[Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia)]]

[[Main Page|different text]]

[[Help:Contents|]]

[[User:John Doe|]]

[[Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia)|]]

[[Extension:DynamicPageList (third-party)|]]

[[Help]]s

[[Help]]ing

[[Help]]ers

[[Help]]almostanylettersyoulikehere

[[Help]]<nowiki />ful advice

[[wikipedia:GNU General Public License|GPL]]<nowiki />v3

#REDIRECT [[Main Page]]

[[#See also]]

[[#See also|different text]]

<div id="NameOfAnchorHere">optional text</div>

[[Help:Images#Supported media types for images]]

[[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|Discussion]]

[[/example]]

[[/example/]]

[[:Category:Help]]

[[media:example.jpg]]

[[media:example.pdf]]

[[Special:MyPage]]

[[Special:MyTalk]]

External links

To add an external link, enclose the URL followed by space and the name of the page you want to link to in single square brackets. When you save the page, you'll see the new link pointing to your page, with an arrow icon after it to show that it was coded with single bracket external link syntax, and thus may lead to another site.

External links to internal pages

To add a link to a page on the same wiki using URL query parameters, you may need to use external link syntax.

[http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Links&action=edit Edit this page]

[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} Edit this page]

<span class="plainlinks">[http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Links&action=edit Edit this page]</span>

External link icons

How to avoid auto-links

When you put a URL on a wiki page it will be automatically converted into an external link, like this:

http://mediawiki.org

To avoid that effect, put the URL between <nowiki> tags, like this:

<nowiki>http://mediawiki.org</nowiki>

To get this:

http://mediawiki.org

Interwiki links

Interwiki links are links with the internal link markup to a website registered in advance. For example, you can link to the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower by typing [[wikipedia:Sunflower]], which will result in a link wikipedia:Sunflower. This is because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ is registered to your wiki by default with the prefix of wikipedia. (This link may not work properly if the admin of your wiki has changed the setting.) Unlike internal links, interwiki links do not use page existence detection, so an interwiki link will appear blue even if the page does not exist on the remote wiki.

Similar to internal page links, you can create piped links, with alternate link label, e.g. [[wikipedia:Sunflower|big yellow flower]] is the link big yellow flower and [[wikipedia:Sunflower|]] is the link Sunflower.

Basically, interwiki links are abbreviations for commonly used longer external links. A very similar link could be created as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower big yellow flower].

More details are at Manual:Interwiki and m:Help:Interwiki linking. See the default interwiki prefixes. To edit the Manual:Interwiki table on your site, see the Interwiki extension.

Interlanguage links

If your wiki has other language versions, you may find “interlanguage links” in the sidebar, just below toolbox in the box named “in other languages.”

Interlanguage links behave similarly to interwiki links, except that they are listed in the sidebar. To create an interlanguage link from a page, just type [[language prefix:pagename]] wherever you like in the page; the language prefix is the prefix specified at your wiki for the other language version (typically the ISO 639-1 language code).

If you want to make the interlanguage link appear in the content of the page rather than in the sidebar, you can add a colon before the language prefix:

[[:en:Sunflower]] → en:Sunflower

When a link is both interwiki and interlanguage, the order is wikipedia:en:Sunflower.

See also

See also

• Linked images