Help:Link

Links are used to connect readers with other pages on the wiki or to other websites. Providing a link gives the reader one-click access to other resources and material, and allows readers to more easily find other pages and navigate around the wiki.

Wikilinks (internal links)
A wikilink, or internal link, is a link to a different page on the same wiki. This can be accomplished by surrounding the text you want to link with double square brackets,. For example, typing:




 * ...will display as:


 * Main Page

The text will appear blue, and when clicked on, will direct you to the Main Page of the wiki. Similarly,  will display as The Sims 2, and link you to the page of the same name. If the name of the page you are linking to does not exist, the link will appear red when rendered, like this. This is known as a "redlink". When you click on the link, you will be taken to a page that will allow you to create the page.

By default, the linked text will always be the same as the page you are linking to. You can change this by using the vertical bar, or "pipe", symbol (|) within the link. For example,  will display as "Visit my homepage". Note that the first term before the vertical bar is the name of the page you are linking to, while the second term after the vertical bar is the text that is displayed. These kinds of links are sometimes known as "piped links".

The link target is case sensitive except for the first letter, so  links to the same page as , but   does not link to the same place. Underscores in the link are interpreted as spaces, so  links to the same page as.

If you try to link to the current page (called a "self-link"), the text will appear as bold text. For example, typing  on this page will produce Help:Link. This is not the case with section links, which will be explained further down this page.

Blend links
If the text you want to display contains the exact same words as the name of the linked page, you can save some time by using what is called "link blending" or "link trailing". For example, if you wanted to link to the page camera and wanted to display the text "cameras", you can simply type, which produces "cameras". This is equivalent to typing.

Link trailing will follow all subsequent text that is placed after the closing brackets and include them as part of the link. Link trailing stops when you add a space, a capital letter, or punctuation. To disable link trailing, you can add  after the closing brackets.

Pipe trick
The "pipe trick" is a technique that can allow you to quickly fill the displayed text field for a piped link. This is done by writing a link like you normally would, but simply ending the link with a pipe rather than with the displayed text, like this:.

When this is done, the displayed text will automatically be generated when the '' button is clicked. This text will automatically remove any text in parenthesis, text that comes after the first comma, and text that comes before the first colon.

If the linked page contains both commas and a final parenthesis, only the parenthesis is removed.

The pipe trick does not work in edit summaries, within  or   tags, or in section links.

Linking to files and categories
If you want to link to a file or category page, you will need to add a colon to the start of the link in order to prevent it from actually adding the file or category to the page. For example,  or.

Section links
To link to a specific section on a page, append a  and the section name to the link, like so:



Sections are usually created by using headings. Creating a heading will automatically create what is known as an "HTML anchor" of the same name as the heading. For example:

{| style="width:100%;" !scope="col" style="width:50%;"| You type !scope="col" style="width:50%;"| You get
 * style="width:50%; background:#f9f9f9; border-width:1px;border-style:solid none none solid;border-color:#ddd; padding:9px 5px 5px; vertical-align:top;"| 
 * style="width:50%; background:#f9f9f9; border-width:1px;border-style:solid none none solid;border-color:#ddd; padding:9px 5px 5px; vertical-align:top;"| 

Geography

 * style="width:50%; background:#f9f9f9; border-width:1px;border-style:solid none none solid;border-color:#ddd; padding:9px 5px 5px; vertical-align:top;"|


 * style="width:50%; border-width:1px;border-style:solid none none none;border-color:#ddd; padding:5px; vertical-align:top;"|
 * style="width:50%; border-width:1px;border-style:solid none none none;border-color:#ddd; padding:5px; vertical-align:top;"|
 * }
 * }

You can link to this section by typing.

You can also create an HTML anchor in any location on the page without having to create a heading through the use of the Anchor template. For example, typing:



...will not produce any visible output, but you can link to that part of the page by typing.

If you are linking to a section on the same page, you can omit the Name of page parameter and just type. For example,.

If there are multiple sections with the same name, append a "_2" when linking to the second section with the same name, a "_3" for the third, and so forth. For example,,  , and so forth.

Plain links
External links will have an external link icon following them by default. If desired, you can disable this icon by surrounding the link with  tags.

URL protocols
You can use a number of other different URL protocols, or URI schemes. The most common ones are  and , which are used to link to webpages. The software supports a number of other different protocols. These can range from automatically opening one's own email program when they click on an email address to linking to Bitcoin addresses or even torrent download links. These are formatted in a similar fashion to other external links. For example, to create a link that allows people to email, you can type , which will produce: [mailto:john@example.com Email John].

The following protocols are supported:

• bitcoin:

• ftp://

• ftps://

• geo:

• git://

• gopher://

• http://

• https://

• irc://

• ircs://

• magnet:

• mailto:

• ''mms://

• news:

• nntp://

• redis://

• sftp://

• sip:

• sips:

• sms:

• ssh://

• svn://

• tel:

• telnet://

• urn:

• worldwind://

• xmpp:

Interwiki links
An interwiki link is a link that is formatted like a regular wikilink, but points to another wiki or website rather than within. These can make it easier to link to a select list of websites, including all other wikis on Miraheze, without having to use the external link syntax.

For example, when linking to Wikipedia, instead of writing, you can simply write. When the edit is published, the link will not contain the external link icon and will otherwise look like a normal link, except that it will link to Wikipedia rather than to another page on.

You can also use interwiki links to quickly link to other wikis on Miraheze. The syntax is. The wiki prefix is the part that comes before  in your address bar. On, the wiki prefix is , so if you were on another wiki on Miraheze, and you wanted to link to the "The Sims 2" page, you would write:. You can also link to just the main page of the wiki by excluding the last part. For example,.

Below is a list of some of the most commonly used interwiki prefixes.

A complete list of interwiki links can be found here.

Interlanguage links
An interlanguage link is a link that points readers to another language edition of. Unlike other links, interlanguage links are not shown in the body of the article, but on the sidebar. They are typically used to connect different language versions of the currently-viewed page with each other.

Before interlanguage links can be set up, the two wikis must be linked to allow for interlanguage links. This can be done by requesting at the stewards' noticeboard on Meta. Once this is done, typing  on either of the two wikis will create an interlanguage link pointing to the other wiki on the sidebar. For example, if the current page was named "Plankton", interlanguage links to different language wikis would look something like this:

 Plankton Plancton Plancton Планктон

Interlanguage links are typically placed at the bottom of the page, in order to make it easier to organize them.

Protocol-relative URLs
The MediaWiki software that runs supports protocol-relative URLs that do not have a URI protocol at the beginning. By default, they will use the protocol that is currently being used on the page. This was originally used in the past prior to the widespread adoption of HTTPS in order to ensure that users remained on the HTTP or HTTPS version of the website without being accidentally redirected to the other. As Miraheze uses HTTPS on all of its wikis by default, this type of URL formatting should generally not be used.

External links to internal pages
It is not possible to create a regular wikilink to many dynamically generated pages on. For example,  cannot be linked to; attempting to write   will take you to the wrong page. This is because these URLs contain query parameters, like  and. These contain the characters  and   which have special meanings in URLs. If you try to wikilink them, the software will automatically encode them into  and   so that the link will take you to the page titles containing those characters, rather than to the edit window.

To link to pages with query parameters, for instance to create an "Edit" button that users can click on to edit the page, you will need to use external link syntax. For example,  will work correctly.

If you are linking to a page within, there is a better alternative: use the  magic word. For example,  creates a link to edit the current page.

Subpage links
If you are linking to a subpage of the current page, you can shorten the link by simply typing. For example, on the current page (), you can create a link to /example by typing. This is the equivalent of typing.

If you are currently editing a subpage, this syntax works for linking to subpages of the current subpage. You can employ similar syntax to link back to the "parent" page.

Be careful when using subpage links like the one above, as they will break if you move the page to a different title. Subpage links are best used in situations where the page titles are not going to be changed often, or if they are changed, all other subpages would be moved appropriately. Subpage links can also confuse inexperienced editors. When in doubt, it never hurts to simply write out the full page name.