Help:Links/en

There are five types of hypertext links in MediaWiki:


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

Please note that this list does not include category links and file links, which are used to place pages into categories and display images or other media files, respectively.

Internal links
To a so-called internal link to a page on the same wiki (a "wikilink"), use double square brackets wiki markup,. When you preview or save your changes, you will see a link that can be followed to the target page. If the page exists the link is displayed in blue (like the word "create" in the first sentence of this paragraph); if the page does not exist, the link appears red (so the  link is actually rendered like this). Note that the colors could be different if the color scheme of the wiki has been changed from the default. Following such a "redlink" to a missing page (whether or not it is actually red) will usually enable the user to create the page.

To markup any arbitrary string of text (not necessarily a page title) as a link, use a "vertical bar" or "pipe" character, like this:  results in the link category links.

The first letter of the link target is usually case-insensitive (unless the wiki is configured otherwise), meaning links can be capitalized or not (so How to contribute and how to contribute are equivalent). However, the case of every subsequent letter must match the target page exactly (so How to contribute and How To Contribute are not equivalent). Spaces in the page title may be represented as underscores (so How to contribute and How_to_contribute are again equivalent), but using underscores in links will make them visible in the page text (but this can be prevented by using a "pipe").

If the page title you are linking to is that of the page you are editing, the result is not a hyperlink at all but simply bold text (for example, on this page the markup  gives the result ). If you're trying to create a wikilink to the current page, you probably want to link to a specific section or to an anchor within the page; see the examples below.

MediaWiki uses the to keep track of internal wikilinks.

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 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 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 “.”

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 m:Help:Interwiki linking.

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