Help:Links

There are four sorts of links in MediaWiki:
 * 1) internal links to other pages in the wiki
 * 2) external links to websites
 * 3) interwiki links (links to other wikis)
 * 4) inter-language links to other language versions of the same wiki -- see Manual:Wiki family

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, empty pages are displayed 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 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).

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 &lt;nowiki&gt; start & end tags as in:

&lt;nowiki&gt; http://mediawiki.org &lt;/nowiki&gt;

Interwiki links
Interwiki links are links from the local wiki to another wiki. For example you can link to the Sunflower article on wikipedia.org by typing  Sunflower . This results in a link like this: Sunflower

Similar to internal page links, you can create piped links, with alternate link text. e.g.  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  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.

Some interesting things to note:
 * Interwiki links are displayed slightly differently to external links, without the little external link icon.
 * Complex page names with spaces and other characters are handled elegantly, just as they would be for an internal page link, making this more tidy than creating an external link to a full URL. For example  Sunflower County, Mississippi  is in some ways tidier and more elegant than the full URL : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_County%2C_Mississippi