Help:Links

There are five types of links in MediaWiki:

1. Internal links to other pages in the wiki
2. External links to other websites
3. External links to internal pages in the wiki
4. Interwiki links to other websites registered to the wiki in advance
5. 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).

Description	You type	You get
Internal link	[[Main Page]]	Main Page
Piped link	[[Main Page|different text]]	different text
Pipe trick	[[Help:Contents|]] [[User:Illori|]] [[Help:Links|]] Help:Links|]] The pipe trick quickly makes shorter link text, but could be confusing in circumstances like the DynamicPageList link examples.	Contents Illori
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	Helpful advice GPLv3
Redirect	#REDIRECT [[Main Page]]	→ 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]]	Discussion
Internal link to a subpage	[[/example]] Shortcut for [[Help:Links/example|/example]].
Internal link to a subpage without the leading slash	[[/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
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.simplemachines.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:[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

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 <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]], this is the link 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 big yellow flower], 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.