Help:Links/en

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 the link is displayed in blue; if it does not exist it appears red (unless the color scheme of the wiki has been changed from the default). Links to the current page title ("selflinks") do not result in live links but are |displayed in bold. (If you really want to link to the current page, you probably want to link to a specific section or to an anchor; see examples below.)

The first letter of the target page is usually case-insensitive, unless configured otherwise by wiki admins, meaning links can be capitalized or not. The case of every subsequent letter must match exactly. Spaces in the page title may be represented as underscores (i.e., typing an underscore in a link will have the same effect as typing a space), but using underscores in links is not recommended since they will be visible in the page text (this can be prevented by using a pipe; again, examples are shown below).

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.

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:

https://mediawiki.org

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

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

To get this:

https://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, which 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 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 Manual:Interwiki table on your site.

Interlanguage links
If your wiki has other language versions, you may find “interlanguage links” in the sidebar, just below toolbox in a section titled “.”

Interlanguage links behave similarly to interwiki links (or category links), except that they appear as a list in the sidebar and not within the content of the page (or below it in the categories bar). To create an interlanguage link to the corresponding page in another language, 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 m:Help:Interlanguage link.