Help:Links

There are five types of links in MediaWiki:

Internal links to other pages in the wiki
External links to other websites
External links to internal pages in the wiki
Interwiki links to other websites registered to the wiki in advance
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 it is displayed in blue, if it does not, in red. Selflinks to the current page are not transformed in URLs but displayed in bold. (If you really want to link to the current page, use an anchor (see below), or [[#top|current page]] which always links to the top.)

The first letter of the target page is automatically capitalized, unless otherwise set by the admins, 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).

Internal link to a subpage without the leading slash

Description	You type	You get
Internal link	[[Main Page]]	Main Page
Piped link	[[Main Page\|different text]] See also Meta:Help:Piped link	different text
Pipe trick	[[Help:Contents\|]] [[User:John Doe\|]] [[Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia)\|]] [[Extension:DynamicPageList (third-party)\|]] The pipe trick quickly makes shorter link text, but could be confusing in circumstances like the DynamicPageList link examples.	Contents John Doe DynamicPageList DynamicPageList
Word-ending links, following so called "linktrail rules" localised per each language	[[Help]]s [[Help]]ing [[Help]]ers [[Help]]almostanylettersyoulikehere	Helps Helping Helpers Helpalmostanylettersyoulikehere
Avoiding word-ending links	[[Help]]<nowiki />ful advice [[wikipedia:GNU General Public License\|GPL]]<nowiki />v3	Helpful advice GPLv3
Redirect	#REDIRECT [[Main Page]] See also Help:Redirects	→ Main Page
Internal link to an anchor	[[#See also]] Section headings and the top of the page are automatically anchored.	#See also
Internal link to an anchor from different text	[[#See also\|different text]]	different text
Setting an internal link anchor	<div id="NameOfAnchorHere">optional text</div> Omit the "optional text" for invisible anchor.	optional text
Internal link to an anchor at another page	[[Help:Images#Supported media types for images]]	Help:Images#Supported media types for images
Internal link to the current page's talk page	[[{{TALKPAGENAME}}\|Discussion]] See also Help:Magic_words#Page_names	Discussion
Internal link to a subpage	[[/example]] Shortcut for `[[Help:Links/example\|/example]]`. See also Help:Subpages.	/example
[[/example/]] Shortcut for `[[Help:Links/example\|example]]`.	example
Internal link to a category page	[[:Category:Help]] See also Help:Categories	Category:Help
Internal link to an image or a file of other types	[[media:example.jpg]] [[media:example.pdf]] See also Help:Images	media:example.jpg media:example.pdf
Internal link to the user's user page	[[Special:MyPage]]	Special:MyPage
Internal link to the user's talk page	[[Special:MyTalk]]	Special:MyTalk

External links

To add an external link, enclose the URL followed by space and the name of the page you want to link to in single square brackets. When you save the page, you'll see the new link pointing to your page, with an arrow icon after it to show that it was coded with single bracket external link syntax, and thus may lead to another site.

Description	You type	You get
External link	`http://mediawiki.org`	http://mediawiki.org
External link with different label	`[http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]`	MediaWiki
Numbered external link	`[http://mediawiki.org]`	[1]
External links with file icons	`[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.avi video] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ogg sound] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pdf document]` See #External link icons for currently supported icons and extensions.	video sound document
External link to the same host	`http://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename`	http://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/pagename
External link to other host passing the pagename	`http://google.com/search?q={{PAGENAMEE}}` See also: URL encoded page names, PAGENAMEE encoding	http://google.com/search?q=Links
Mailto link	`[mailto:info@example.org email me]`	email me
Mailto named with subject line and body	`[mailto:info@example.org?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject&body=Body%20Text info]`	info

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	[http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Links&action=edit Edit this page]	Edit this page
External link to the current page's edit page using the fullurl parser function	[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}\|action=edit}} Edit this page] See also Help:Magic_words#URL_data and #External links	Edit this page
External link to the current page's edit page, and styled to look like an internal link	<span class="plainlinks">[http://www.mediawiki.org/w/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

External link icons

Test link !! Icon !! Trigger
[2]	external-link-ltr-icon.png	`http://`, `gopher://`
[3]	lock-icon.png	`https://`
[4]	mail-icon.png	`mailto:`
[5]	news-icon.png	`news://`
[6]	file-icon.png	`ftp://`
[7]	talk-icon.png	`irc://`
[8]	audio-icon.png	`.ogg`, `.mid`, `.midi`, `.mp3`, `.wav`, `.wma`
[9]	video-icon.png	`.ogm`, `.avi`, `.mpeg`, `.mpg`
[10]	document-icon.png	`.pdf`, `.pdf#`, `.pdf?`

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:

http://mediawiki.org

To avoid that effect, put the URL between <tvar|1><nowiki></> tags, like this:

<nowiki>http://mediawiki.org</nowiki>

To get this:

http://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 Sunflower article on http://en.wikipedia.org by typing [[wikipedia:Sunflower]], which will result in a link wikipedia:Sunflower. This is because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ is registered to your wiki by default with the prefix of wikipedia. (This link may not work properly 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. [[wikipedia:Sunflower|big yellow flower]] is the link big yellow flower and [[wikipedia:Sunflower|]] is the link Sunflower.

Basically, interwiki links are abbreviations for commonly used longer external links. A very similar link could be created as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower big yellow flower].

More details are at Manual:Interwiki and m:Help:Interwiki linking. See the default interwiki prefixes. To edit the interwiki table on your site, see the Interwiki extension.

Interlanguage links

If your wiki has other language versions, you may find “interlanguage links” in the sidebar, just below toolbox in the box named “in other languages.”

Interlanguage links behave similarly to interwiki links, except that they are listed in the sidebar. To create an interlanguage link from a page, just type [[language prefix:pagename]] wherever you like in the page; the language prefix is the prefix specified at your wiki for the other language version (typically the ISO 639-1 language code).

If you want to make the interlanguage link appear in the content of the page rather than in the sidebar, you can add a colon before the language prefix:

[[:en:Sunflower]] → en:Sunflower

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