Help:Links
There are five types of hypertext links in MediaWiki:
- Internal links to other pages in the same wiki (commonly called "wikilinks")
- External links to pages at other websites
- External links to internal pages in the same wiki
- Interwiki links to other websites using special prefixes registered in advance
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 create a so-called internal link to a page on the same wiki (a "wikilink"), use double square brackets wiki markup, [[like this]]
. 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 [[like this]]
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: [[Help:Categories|category links]]
results in the link category links.
The first letter of the link target is usually not case-sensitive (unless the wiki is configured otherwise), meaning links can be capitalized or not (so Eris Ice and eris ice are equivalent). However, the case of every subsequent letter must match the target page exactly (so Eris Ice and Eris Ice are not equivalent). Spaces in the page title may be represented as underscores (so Eris Ice and Eris_Ice 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 [[Help:Links]]
gives the result Help:Links). 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 pagelinks database table to keep track of internal wikilinks.
Name/Description | Syntax | Result |
---|---|---|
Internal link | [[Main Page]] [[Help:Contents]] [[GSWiki:About]] |
|
Piped link |
[[Help:Editing|editing help]] Links to a section/anchor within the target page. [[Help:Editing#Advanced_guides|advanced guides]] Piped link to an anchor on the same page [[#See also|different text]] See also Help:Piped link. |
|
Pipe trick | [[Manual:Extensions|]] [[User:John Doe|]] [[Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia)|]] [[Extension:DynamicPageList (third-party)|]] The pipe trick involves less typing for editors, but is potentially confusing to readers. |
|
Word-ending links | [[Help]]s [[Help]]ing [[Help]]ers [[Help]]almostanylettersyoulikehere [[Help]]BUTnotalways Follows so-called "linktrail rules" localised per each language. |
Helpalmostanylettersyoulikehere HelpBUTnotalways
|
Avoiding word-ending links | [[Help]]<nowiki />full advice [[wikipedia:GNU General Public License|GPL]]<nowiki />v3 |
Helpful advice GPLv3 |
Link to an anchor on the same page | [[#See also]] Anchors are provided automatically on section headings and to the top of the page. |
#See also
|
Setting an anchor for incoming links | <div id="Unique anchor name 1">optional text</div> <span id="Unique anchor name 2">optional text</span> Rendered block-level and inline, respectively.
Doing this would allow for
==<span id="Alternate Section Title"></span>Section heading== Note the placement. This must be a "span" tag, not a "div". (Such anchors allow sections to be retitled without breaking incoming links.) |
optional text
|
Link to an anchor at another page | [[Help:Editing#Community]] |
Help:Editing#Community |
Link to the current page's talk page | [[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|Discussion]] See also Help:Magic words#Page names |
Discussion |
Link to a subpage | [[/example]] Shortcut for |
/example |
Link to a subpage without the leading slash | [[/example/]] Shortcut for |
example |
Link to a subpage of parent page for current page. Can only be used on subpages. | [[../example2]] Shortcut for |
example2 |
Visible link to a category page | [[:Category:Help]] Without the leading colon the link would not be visible and the page would instead be placed into the category; this is a very common mistake. See also Help:Categories. |
Category:Help |
Visible link to an image or media file | [[:File:Weird gloop.png]] [[:File:Weird gloop.png|this example]] [[Media:Weird gloop.png]] Without the leading colon on the "File:" examples, the images would actually be displayed. See also Help:Images. The |
|
Link to a page specific to each reader (user page, etc.) | [[Special:MyPage]] [[Special:MyTalk]] [[Special:Preferences]] |
|
Internal link to a specific revision | [[Special:PermanentLink/34458114]] Revision numbers can be found in each page's edit history. (It is very common to see links to specific revisions implemented as external links because it's easy to cut-and-paste an entire URL to form an external link.) |
Special:PermanentLink/34458114 |
Internal link to a "diff" | [[Special:Diff/34458114]] [[Special:Diff/7178134/34458114]] The default (in the first example above) is to show the changes from the previous revision. See also the comments in the previous item. |
|
Redirect | #REDIRECT [[Main Page]] Should be the first and only line on the page. See Help:Redirects. |
Main Page |
External links
To create an external link, usually to a page at a different website, enclose the URL followed by space and the link text in single square brackets (see examples below). When you save or preview the page, you will see a link rendered slightly differently than an internal wikilink. It may be a different color and/or be followed by an arrow icon to show that it may lead to another site.
Description | You type | You get |
---|---|---|
External link with specified link text | [https://mediawiki.org MediaWiki] |
MediaWiki |
Numbered external link | [https://mediawiki.org] This is what happens if you omit the link text. Multiple links of this type on the same page are numbered sequentially. |
[1] |
Bare external link | https://mediawiki.org URLs beginning with " |
https://mediawiki.org |
Avoiding auto-linked URLs | <nowiki>https://mediawiki.org</nowiki> |
https://mediawiki.org |
Protocol-relative external link |
[//en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia] [//en.wikipedia.org //en.wikipedia.org] The link will be HTTP or HTTPS depending on the protocol of the page currently being viewed (which could be different for different users).
This is only supported inside of square brackets |
|
External link to the current server | https://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename |
https://wiki.geministation.com/pagename |
External link to other host passing the pagename | https://google.com/search?q={{PAGENAMEE}} See also: URL encoded page names, PAGENAMEE encoding |
https://google.com/search?q=Links |
Mailto link | [mailto:[email protected] email me] |
email me |
Mailto named with subject line and body | [mailto:[email protected]?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject&body=Body%20Text info] |
info |
Custom UR | [skype:echo123 call me] Any URI you wish to add needs to be first declared through $wgUrlProtocols by a sysadmin. (This example is not enabled on GeminiStation wiki) |
[skype:echo123 call me] |
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.
Description | You type | You get |
---|---|---|
External link to the current page's edit page | [https://wiki.geministation.com/index.php?title=Help:Links&action=edit Edit this page] [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} Edit this page] See also Help:Magic_words#URL_data and External links above. |
|
External link to the current page's edit page, and styled to look like an internal link | <span class="plainlinks">[https://wiki.geministation.com/index.php?title=Help:Links&action=edit Edit this page]</span> The plainlinks class can be used in cases where you want an external link to look like an internal one, by suppressing the icon that normally appears after it. |
Edit this page |
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower by typing [[wikipedia:Sunflower]]
or, on this wiki, the shorter [[w:Sunflower]]
. Both will result in a link wikipedia:Sunflower. 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. [[wikipedia:Sunflower|big yellow flower]]
is the link big yellow flower and [[wikipedia:Sunflower|]]
is the link Sunflower.
More details are at Help:Interlanguage links and a list of all prefixes can be found at Special:Interwiki.
Limits
An internal wiki link is limited by maximum page title size.
See also
- Manual:Linked images
- Help:Links on MediaWiki
- Help:Link on Wikipedia