Manual:Interwiki

Interwiki links are links to pages of other projects, using a prefixed internal link style.

Interwiki links make it possible, to link to pages of (e.g.) Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews etc. or to your wiki-project in different languages (see Manual:Wiki family).

A link like  will appear like this: Main Page and redirect you to Wikipedia's Main Page.

Interwiki links to other projects
Interwiki links are hosted in the interwiki table of the Mediawiki database.

Default
Several Wikimedia-Projects (and others) are ready for interwiki linking by default, so you can use them without editing your database. Note that wikipedia was only added as one of the interwiki defaults since v1.10

The following are some examples of interwiki prefixes which are available by default:

Note 1: prefix mediawikiwiki may not work on your project, so please use prefix mw instead.

Adding a new website for interwiki linking

 * Interwiki links are set in the  table of the database.
 * To modify these, you will need to edit the database, as below.
 * You might prefer to install an Interwiki extension, which eases the process.

As the Wikipedia isn't set up by default in version 1.9 and before, you might want to add it (and other projects that you desire).

The examples below show how to set up  as a link to the English Wikipedia.

The idea is to insert a line of the form: ('prefix', 'URL format string', 1, 0) into the  table.

Single line
Advanced users may use a single command line, as follows: INSERT INTO interwiki SET iw_prefix='w', iw_url='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1', iw_local=1, iw_trans=0 ; INSERT INTO interwiki (iw_prefix, iw_url, iw_local, iw_trans) VALUES ('w', 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1', 1, 0);
 * mySQL
 * PostgreSQL

Export, add, re-import
Alternatively, you can use the following multi-step process, which exports the interwiki table, adds a line, then re-imports it:

('w', 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1', 1, 0);
 * Export the database table
 * add to the end of the table a line of the following form (using English wikipedia as an example):


 * Import the database table

To test
To test configuration:
 * Go to your site,
 * create an article, with the following content:
 * This should display a link to the 'Village pump' page on en.Wikipedia.org (the url )
 * This should display a link to the 'Village pump' page on en.Wikipedia.org (the url )

Field documentation
In detail, the fields of the  database table are as follows:
 *  : choose a prefix, which is used for interwiki linking, e.g. "wikipedia" for linking to Wikipedia.
 *  : enter the project's URL, e.g.  for Wikipedia. Don't forget the   as it is replaced with the article's name you are linking to (  links to  ).
 *  : enter the project's URL, e.g.  for Wikipedia. Don't forget the   as it is replaced with the article's name you are linking to (  links to  ).
 *  : if 1, your wiki will redirect even external links of the form iw_prefix:title, not only those from its own pages. you need this if you want to use the redirect functionality from outside your wiki or other wikis use your transwiki functions for nested transwiki links (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Accueil)
 *  : "transwiki transclusion" - set to 1 if you want to use pages from the other wiki as templates. You will also need to set $wgEnableScaryTranscluding = true in your LocalSettings.php

Interwiki links to other languages
If you have installed a Wiki family, you can link from an article in English to an article in German (if you have a German project, too). You can set up MediaWiki, to show those links in the sidebar, just below the toolbox.

In your filesystem, there is a subfolder of your MediaWiki installation, called "languages". Go there and have a look at " " as it contains a list of known languages and their prefixes. E.g. you want to add your German project, search " " for "Deutsch" and note the prefix "de".

If you know the "right" prefix, edit your database by adding a new line to table :
 *  : language-prefix (e.g. "de" for German), which is listed in " "
 *  : URL to your wiki-project (e.g. )
 *  : same as above "Adding More"
 *  : same as above "Adding More"

Now, you can link an article to the same in other languages. Adding  on your english Main_Page will create a link "Deutsch" below the toolbox, which leads to the Main_Page of the German wiki (Hauptseite).

Note, that this link is shown in Sidebar's section, only, and not inside of the article. If you want to create a link inside of the text, you have to add a colon previous to the prefix:.