Help:Links

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There are four sorts of links in MediaWiki:

1. internal links to other pages in the wiki
2. external links to other websites
3. interwiki links to other websites registered to the wiki in advance
4. 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, it it does not, in red. Selflinks to the current page are not transformed in URLs but displayed in bold.

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).

Description	You type	You get
Internal link	[[Main Page]]	Main Page
Piped link	[[Main Page|different text]]	different text
Redirect	#REDIRECT [[Main Page]] See also Help:Redirects	→ Main Page
Internal link to an anchor	[[#See also]] Section headings and the top of the page are automatically anchored.	#See also
Internal link to an anchor at another page	[[Help:Images#See also]]	Help:Images#See also
Internal link to a category page	[[:Category:Help]] See also Help:Categories	Category:Help
Internal link to an image or a file of other types	[[media:example.jpg]] [[media:example.pdf]] See also Help:Images	media:example.jpg media:example.pdf

External links

Description	You type	You get
External link	http://mediawiki.org	http://mediawiki.org
External link with different label	[http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]	MediaWiki
External link numbered	[http://mediawiki.org]	[1]
External link icons	[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.avi video] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.wav sound] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pdf document] External link icons may differ depending on the file type of the target.	video sound document
External link to the same host	[http://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename]	[2]
External link to other host passing the pagename	[http://google.com/search?q={{PAGENAMEE}}]	[3]
Mailto link	[mailto:info@example.org email me]	email me
Mailto named with subject line and body	[mailto:info@example.org?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject&body=Body%20Text info]	info

Tip for wiki admins: Which protocols (like http:) are allowed for links is controlled by the $wgUrlProtocols setting.

Tip for wiki admins: To remove the “external link icons“ from next to each of the external links, add the following to the page located at MediaWiki:Monobook.css on your wiki. <source lang="css"> bodyContent a.external, bodyContent a[href ^="gopher://"] { background: none; padding-right: 0; } </source>

How to avoid auto-links

By default, when you write a URL as is, it will be transformed to an external link.

To avoid that effect, put the URL between <nowiki> tags as in:

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

Interwiki links

Interwiki links are links with the internal link markup to a website registered in advance. For example, you can link to the Sunflower article on http://en.wikipedia.org 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.

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

Basically this is an abbreviation for longer URLs. A very similar link could be created as a normal external link by typing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower Sunflower], but interwiki links allow you to type out an easy and compact link, almost as if you are linking to a page on your own wiki.

Tip for wiki admins: See Manual:Interwiki for the management of interwiki links of your wiki.

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 similar 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 language code).

If you want to make the interlanguage link to appear in the content of the page, you can add a colon before the language prefix, e. g. [[:en:Sunflower]].

See also

• Linked images

Syntax

{{Languages|PageName}}

• PageName (optional) - the name of the page to display language links for. If omitted then the English version of the current page is used. This parameter can normally be omitted, as it is only required if you want to link to a page other than the one you place the template on, which is very uncommon. If this parameter is used on a sub-page make sure you supply the root name, not the full page name (e.g. on MediaWiki/fr you would need to use {{Languages|MediaWiki}} and not {{Languages|MediaWiki/fr}}).

Usage

The template should only be placed on pages that exist in more than one language, and it should be placed in the same location on each translation of the page.

The English version of a page is always the main version, with all other languages as sub-pages, named using the appropriate language code (see below).

For example, on the Main Page you would include the text {{Languages}}, both on Main Page itself, and on each of its language sub-pages. The template automatically creates links to any language sub-pages that exist, e.g. Main Page/ja<tt>, <tt>Main Page/fr, and ignores non-existant languages.

See Project:Language policy for further details about translating pages.

Supported languages

This shows you the name of each language's sub-page (using Main Page as an example). Other languages may be added easily as necessary. Please use the appropriate prefix, as used on Wikipedia when adding a new language. Please do not add languages for which no pages exist yet, as this will increase the time needed to include the template without adding any benefit (languages are only displayed to the user when the relevant page exists).

The link on the language names goes to the Wikipedia in that language. If no Wikipedia in your language exists, do not add pages in that language to MediaWiki.org! This wiki is not the place for language advocacy - please go through the correct channels, and once your language has a Wikipedia then please return to add content here.

Page Name	Language
Main Page	English

Example

Here is how the language bar looks on the MediaWiki page: