Help:Links

There are four sorts of links in MediaWiki:


 * 1) internal links to other pages in the wiki
 * 2) external links to other websites
 * 3) interwiki links to other websites registered to the wiki in advance
 * 4) 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 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 (except in redirects)).

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  tags as in: http://scratch.mit.edu

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, which will result in a link Sunflower. This is because  is registered to your wiki by default with the prefix of. 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..

Basically this is an abbreviation for longer URLs. A very similar link could be created as a normal external link by typing, 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.

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

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

If you want to make the interlanguage link to appear in the content of the page, you can add a colon before the language prefix, e. g..

Examples: This Article is connected to DACH-Scratch-Wiki because there is a  at the end of the Articles Mediawiki-Sourcecode, To see this link not in the Language-Box, but in the Article-Text write    and you'll get:  de:Scratch-Wiki:Hilfe:Links.

Red Links
Red links, like this one, are created when a link references a page/URL that does not exist. Red links also appear in the recent changes when a page is deleted or moved without leaving behind a reference. Recently, a new initiative was commenced to end user namespace-based red links and requires the template NoRed to be placed on those pages that do not exist. However, it was quickly stopped due to the issue of historic accuracy.

de:Scratch-Wiki:Hilfe:Links