Help:Links

There are five types of hypertext links in MediaWiki:


 * 1) internal>#Internal links|Internal links to other pages in the same wiki (commonly called "wikilinks")
 * 2) external>#External links|External links to pages at other websites
 * 3) external2>#External links to internal pages|External links to internal pages in the same wiki
 * 4) interwiki>#Interwiki links|Interwiki links to other websites using special prefixes registered in advance
 * 5) interlang>#Interlanguage links|Interlanguage links to other wikis registered as different language versions of the current wiki

Please note that this list does not include h-cat>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Categories|category links and h-img>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Images|file links, which are used to place pages into categories and display images or other media files, respectively.

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.

External link icons
Some MediaWiki installations are set up to use special icons to denote external links to specific file types or using specific protocols. None of these special icons are enabled here on MediaWiki.org, but we present them here for the sake of completeness.

Interwiki links
Interwiki links are internal-style links to other websites (which do not have to be wikis, despite the name). For example, you can link to the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower by typing  or, on this wiki, the shorter. Both will result in a link Sunflower. This works because by default MediaWiki configures  as an "interwiki prefix" that turns into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ when used inside. (It may not work 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.  is the link big yellow flower and   is the link Sunflower.

Basically, interwiki links are abbreviations for commonly-used longer external links. A very similar link could be created as.

More details are at interwiki>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Interwiki|Manual:Interwiki and m:Help:Interwiki linking. Your wiki may have a Special:Interwiki page listing the interwiki prefixes it supports;. You can edit the interwiki-table>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Interwiki table|Manual:Interwiki table on your site.

Interlanguage links
If your wiki has other language versions, you may find “interlanguage links” in the sidebar>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Navigation#Sidebar|sidebar, just below toolbox>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Navigation#Toolbox|toolbox in a section titled “.”

In wiki markup an interlanguage link looks very much like an interwiki link, but behaves similarly to a category link in that it is rendered in a special way. While category links appear in a special list at the bottom of the page (usually), interlanguage links appear in a special list in the sidebar of the page (or elsewhere, depending on the wiki's configuration and the skin used).

The purpose of interlanguage links is to link pages on the same topics in different languages. To create an interlanguage link, type  anywhere in the page (preferably at the bottom, like category links); the language prefix is the prefix specified at your wiki for the other language version (typically the ISO 639-1 language code).

The interlanguage link is unilateral, it does not point back from that page in the other language.

For that purpose, an equivalent back-link needs to be placed there as well.

It does not work like the "Edit links" in the languages section of Wikipedia-language versions.

But it can be used across all name spaces, including 'User:' to point to ones other profiles in other languages.

If you want to make the interlanguage link appear at a specific place in the content of the page rather than in the sidebar, add a colon before the language prefix:
 * &rarr; en:Sunflower

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

For more information, see meta>m:Help:Interwiki linking#Interlanguage links.

Limits
An internal wiki link is limited by maximum page title size.