Help:Linking

← Help:Editing

Links (sometimes called hyperlinks) are all over the web. You probably followed one to find this page.

To add a link to another wiki page, type [[, then the page name, then ]].

[[Main Page]]

Main Page

If you want to link to the page but don't want to type in the exact name of the page, add a | between the page name and the ]], and then write what you want the text to be.

[[Help Talk:Contents|The discussion page]]

The discussion page

To link to a page on Wikipedia, add Wikipedia: to your page name.

[[Wikipedia:Half-Life 2|Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia]]

Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia

There are other websites you can link to as well. See here for a full list.

To link to somewhere outside of the wiki, type [, then the URL, followed by a space, the text you want to describe the link, and then ].

[https://www.google.com/ External link to Google]

External link to Google

You can also just directly paste in a URL, but it doesn't look as nice

https://www.google.com/

A URL pointing to an image will display that image on a page. It won't have the best formatting however. Exercise caution when doing this and note that images from another website may change or disappear at any time.

The template we call ent is convenient for when you want to make text both a link and code at once.

Tip:You normally only need to link a term the first time it is mentioned in an article, but if the separate mentions are far apart you might want to link it more than once. Furthermore, consider your audience; you probably don't need to link to Source on a page about programming.

Red (broken) links

It's O.K. to link to a non-existent page! We would prefer that you then created that page, if you know about it. What we don't want is a page that's just "todo: make this page".

If you've created a page and pre-existing links to it still show as red, add ?action=purge to the end of the URLs to update their link colors. You can also do this by pressing the Edit button on the pages and saving them without changing anything.

Note:Broken links are only detected for wiki pages, not external or Wikipedia links.

Link Colors

Type of Link	Before Visiting	After Visiting
Wiki pages and external links	#8BB9E0	#002BB8
Inter-wiki links	#36B	#551A8B
Broken links	#D64B4B	#BA0000

Links that link to their own pages (excluding ones redirecting to other sections) will appear to be bold.

See Also

• Help:Redirects
• Special:BrokenRedirects - Pages that need to have redirect links fixed.
• Special:DeadendPages - Pages that need more links on them.
• Special:DoubleRedirects - Redirects that need to be fixed (chaining is bad).
• Special:LinkSearch - Search through external links.
• Special:ListRedirects - List of all redirects.
• Special:LonelyPages - Pages that need to be linked to in other places.
• Special:MostInterwikis - Lists pages with the highest number of links to other wikis. (as of July 23rd, 2018 it seems no pages link to more than one?)
• Special:MostLinkedCategories - Lists categories that are most frequently linked to by other pages.
• Special:MostLinkedPages - Most linked-to pages.
• Special:PermanentLink - Generates permanent links for pages. Seems to not work currently.
• Special:RecentChangesLinked - Lists all recent changes to pages that are linked to by a certain page.
• Special:WantedPages - Pages that are linked to a lot, but do not exist.
• Special:WhatLinksHere - Shows pages that have links to a specific page.