Help:Links

PD

Important note: When you edit this page, you agree to release your contribution into the public domain. If you don't want this or can't do this because of license restrictions, please don't edit. This page is one of the Public Domain Help Pages, which can be freely copied into fresh wiki installations and/or distributed with MediaWiki software; see Help:Contents for an overview of all pages. See Help:Copying for instructions.

There are four sorts of links in MediaWiki:

1. internal links to other pages in the wiki
2. external links to websites
3. interwiki links (links to other wikis)
4. inter-language links to other language versions of the same wiki

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, empty pages are displayed in red. Selflinks to the current page are not transformed in URLs but displayed in bold.

The first letter of the target page is automatically capitalized 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).

How to link

Description	You type	You get
Internal link	[[Main Page]]	Main Page
Piped link	[[Main Page|different text]]	different text
External link	http://mediawiki.org	http://mediawiki.org
External link, different title	[http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]	MediaWiki
External link, numbered	[http://mediawiki.org]	[1]
Anchor link	[[#See also]]	#See also
Anchor link at another page	[[Help:Images#See also]]	Help:Images#See also
Category link	[[:Category:Help]]	Category:Help
Internal link to image file	[[media:example.jpg]]	media:example.jpg
Internal link to pdf file	[[media:example.pdf]]	media:example.pdf
Interwiki link	[[Wikipedia:MediaWiki]]	Wikipedia:MediaWiki
mailto link	[mailto:info@example.org email me]	email me
redirect	#REDIRECT [[Main Page]]	→ Main Page

More advanced

Description	You type	You get
Piped link, different title	[[Main Page|<span title="different title">different text</span>]]	different text
External link, same host unnamed	[http://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename]	[2]
mailto named with subject line and body	[mailto:info@example.org?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject&body=Body%20Text info]	info

---

20px	Tip for wiki admins: Which protocols (like http:) are allowed for links is controlled by the $wgUrlProtocols setting.

20px	Tip for wiki admins: To remove the 'external link image' from next to each of the external links, add the following to the page located at MediaWiki:Monobook.css on your wiki. #bodyContent a.external, #bodyContent a[href ^="gopher://"] { background: none; padding-right: 0; }

How to avoid auto-links

By default, when you write a URL as is, it will be transformed to an external link.

To avoid that effect, put the URL between <nowiki> start & end tags as in:

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

Interwiki links

Interwiki links are links from the local wiki to another wiki. For example you can link to the Sunflower article on wikipedia.org by typing [[wikipedia:Sunflower]]. This results in a link like this: wikipedia:Sunflower

Similar to internal page links, you can create piped links, with alternate link text. e.g. [[wikipedia:Sunflower|big yellow flower]]

Basically this is an abbreviation for longer URLs. A very similar link could be created as a normal external link by typing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower Sunflower], but interwiki links allow you to type out an easy and compact link, almost as if you are linking to a page on your own wiki.

Some interesting things to note:

• Interwiki links are displayed slightly differently to external links, without the little external link icon.
• Complex page names with spaces and other characters are handled elegantly, just as they would be for an internal page link, making this more tidy than creating an external link to a full URL. For example [[wikipedia:Sunflower County, Mississippi]] is in some ways tidier and more elegant than the full URL : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_County%2C_Mississippi

See also

• Linked images