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. By default, if the page exists already it is displayed in blue, if it does not exist, it is displayed in red. Self links 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 or with the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word, 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 | [[Contents|]] [[User:Foo|]] [[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 |
| Word-ending links, following so called "linktrail rules" localised per each language | [[Help]]s [[Help]]ing [[Help]]ers [[Help ]]pages [[Help]]almostanylettersyoulikehere |
Help pages |
| 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 Redirects |
→ Main Page |
| Internal link to an anchor | [[#Internal links]] Section headings and the top of the page are automatically anchored. |
#Internal links |
| Internal link to an anchor from different text | [[#Internal links|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 | [[Basic images#Supported media types for images]] |
Basic images#Supported media types for images |
| Internal link to the current page's talk page | [[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|Discussion]]
See also Magic words#Page names |
Discussion |
| Internal link to a subpage | [[/example]] Shortcut for |
/example |
| Internal link to a subpage without the leading slash | [[/example/]] Shortcut for |
example |
| Internal link to a category page | [[:Category:Help]] See also Categories |
Category:Help |
| Internal link to an image or a file of other types | [[File:example.jpg]] [[File:example.pdf]] [[:File:example.jpg]] See also Advanced 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 | https://mediawiki.org
|
https://mediawiki.org |
| External link with different label | [https://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]
|
MediaWiki |
| Numbered external link | [https://mediawiki.org]
|
[1] |
| External link to the same host | https://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename
|
https://help.fandom.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 |
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://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=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 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">[https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=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 |
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:
To avoid that effect, put the URL between <nowiki>, like this:
<nowiki>https://mediawiki.org</nowiki>
To get this:
https://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 https://en.wikipedia.org by typing [[wikipedia:Sunflower]], which will result in a link wikipedia:Sunflower. This is because https://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 an 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 [https://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.
More details are at mw:Manual:Interwiki. To edit the interwiki table on your site, see the Interwiki extension.
Gamepedia has some policies concerning interwiki links to projects that are not on our network.
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, 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, you can add a colon before the language prefix:
[[:en:Sunflower]]→ en:Sunflower
When link is both interwiki and interlanguage, the order is wikipedia:en:Sunflower.