Help:Linking
That means that this article contains information intended to advise or aid on the functions of the wiki, on how to use the wiki, or on general recommendations for users of the wiki.
Links (sometimes called hyperlinks) are all over the web. You probably followed one to find this page.
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.Creating Links
To add a link to another wiki page, type [[, then the page name, then ]], for example:
[[Main Page]]→ Main Page[[Help Talk:Contents]]→ Help Talk:Contents
If you want a different display text, 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
If you only want to get rid of the namespace in the displayed text (everything before the first colon), then you can use the pipe trick by specifying an empty display text. It can also be used to remove a parenthesized part of the link title.
[[Help Talk:Contents|]]→ Contents[[Bounce (level design)]]→ Bounce (level design)[[Bounce (level design)|]]→ Bounce
To link to a Category page, you must add a colon at the beginning, otherwise you add the page to that category and nothing will be displayed.
[[:Category:Level Design]]→ Category:Level Design[[:Category:Level Design|]]→ Level Design
Useful Templates
The template we call {{ent}} is convenient for when you want to make text both a link and code at once.
{{ent|info_player_start}}→info_player_start{{ent|sv_cheats|1}}→sv_cheats 1
The templates {{tl}} and {{tl2}} are convenient to link to a template.
[[Template:ent]]→ Template:ent[[Template:ent|]]→ ent{{tl|ent}}→{{ent}}{{tl2|ent}}→ {{ent}}
If you want to link to a specific game, there is most likely a template for it, such as {{hl2}} for Half-Life 2. See Help:Templates#Per-game Templates for more variants. For short, it is also pretty common to use just the icon as a link. See Game icons for a list of game icon templates.
{{hl2}}→
{{hl2|1}}→ Half-Life 2{{hl2|4}}→ Half-Life 2
External links
To link to a page on the English Wikipedia, add Wikipedia: to the page name or just w: for short.
For the Wikipedia of a different language, insert the appropriate abreviation between these two like in the 4th example below.
There are other websites you can link to as well, see here for a full list.
[[Wikipedia:Half-Life 2|Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia]]→ Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia[[w:Half-Life 2|Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia]]→ Half-Life 2 on Wikipedia[[w:Half-Life 2|]]→ Half-Life 2[[w:de:Half-Life 2|]]→ Half-Life 2 (German)
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 ].
You can also just directly paste in a URL, but it doesn't look as nice.
[https://www.google.com/ External link to Google]→ External link to Googlehttps://www.google.com/→ 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.
Red Links
If you link to a page of this site that does not exist, the link text will turn red. This does not apply to Wikipedia or External 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.
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.
