Help:Links

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.

There are four sorts of links in MediaWiki:

internal links to other pages in the wiki
external links to websites
inter-wiki links (links to other wikis)
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
Category link	`[[:Category:Help]]`	Category:Help
Piped link	`[[Main Page\|different text]]`	different text
Anchor link	`[[#External links\|Anchor link]]`	Anchor link
External link	`http://mediawiki.org`	http://mediawiki.org
Internal link to image file	`[[media:example.jpg]]`	media:example.jpg
External link, different title	`[http://mediawiki.org MediaWiki]`	MediaWiki
Piped link, different title	`[[Main Page\|<span title="different title">different text</span>]]`	different text
External link, unnamed	`[http://mediawiki.org]`	[1]
External link, same host unnamed	`[http://{{SERVERNAME}}/pagename]`	[2]
Interwiki link	`[[Wikipedia:MediaWiki]]`	Wikipedia:MediaWiki
mailto	`mailto:info@example.org`	mailto:info@example.org
mailto unnamed	`[mailto:info@example.org]`	[3]
mailto named	`[mailto:info@example.org info]`	info
mailto named with subject line	`[mailto:info@example.org?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject info]`	info
redirect	`#REDIRECT [[Main Page]]`	→ Main Page

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

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;
}