GeezerVison

A wikilink is enclosed in double square brackets.

On any Wikimedia page, [[Example]] produces a wikilink with the display text Example and the target page Example on the project you're currently on. For instance, here on the English Wikipedia, the wikilink would lead to the following URL (note the "en" in the address): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example

To link to a section in another page, append a hash mark, pound or number sign (#) followed by the section name to the page name:

[[Page name#Section name|Displayed text]]

Note the use of piping, done to hide the # character. This is appropriate in Wikipedia articles.

Alternatively, format such section links with the section sign (§) instead of a # by using the {{Section link}} template (alias {{slink}}):

{{Section link|Page name|Section name}}

Note: you cannot use the § directly.

That is, use section link or Page name § Section name rather than Page name#Section name. A third option is to use a redirect (link to a page which link directly to a section, see MOS:SECTLINK).

Outside of article space, such as in talk page discussions, using the raw # syntax is fine. Wikipedia inherits this syntax from HTML.

These section links work the same regardless of nesting, i.e. whether you link to a section header, a subsection header or a sub-subsection header (sections nestled inside other sections):

[[Page name#Subsection name|Displayed text]]

{{Section link|Page name|Subsection name}}

Note that this means that each header title must be unique across the entire page (or your browser will simply link to the first one encountered). You do not and cannot indicate "a section within a section" — [[Page name#Section name#Subsection name|Displayed text]] doesn't work as intended.

To link to a section on the page you're already on, you may omit the page name:

[[#Section name|Displayed text]]

{{Section link||Section name}}

Omitting the page name is recommended when linking to a section in the same page because the link will work as expected when previewing changes or after moving the page. It also makes it clear you intend a same-page link.

Note that section names are entirely case sensitive, in contrast to article links, where the first letter is not case sensitive.

The characters [ ] { } | (right and left square bracket, right and left curly braces, and the vertical bar) require encoding when linking to a section. That is, you cannot use these characters inside the [[...]] of a link. See note.^[1]

For more information, see Help:Section. See also Wikipedia:Redirect § Targeted and untargeted redirects.

Use a vertical bar | (the "pipe" symbol) to create a link with different display text than the name of the target page. Such a link is called a piped link. Within the link brackets [[target|text]], the part preceding the pipe gives the actual title of the link target page, and the part following the pipe gives the link display text:

[[a|b]] appears on the page as b, but, when opened, links to page a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

When a wikilink is opened, Wikipedia tries to resolve the Wikilink target title to its canonical target page. See § Conversion to canonical form

When resolving the target page, the target title is treated as case-sensitive except for the first character:

• [[atom]] links to Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom
• [[aTom]] would link to "ATom", which does not exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATom

:root .mw-selflink { text-decoration: none; }

When editing source, links are inserted or deleted simply by adding or removing pairs of square brackets enclosing the text concerned (plus handling piped links).

There are some helpful tools:

• When using the visual editor, selecting some text, then clicking the link icon above the text box (two links of a chain) will allow the link to be added, offering a selection of possible matches and the ability to pipe.
• When using the WikEd source editor, selectable from Preferences > Gadgets > Editing, there is a "Wiki link" button (typically the first button on the bottom row). When editing, if some text is highlighted, clicking the Wiki link button will enclose it in double brackets, i.e., Wikilink it. If, however, some text is highlighted that includes one or more internal links—in many cases just a single internal link with its delimiting brackets—they will be removed instead. For a single link without a pipe, the Wiki link button will toggle between linking and unlinking.

A wikilink cannot add a URL query string like oldid=1378122836 in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Link&oldid=1378122836. There is sometimes a special page to get the same result with a wikilink.

• Special:PermanentLink can link an old revision like Special:PermanentLink/1378122836. See Help:Permanent link.
• Special:Diff can link a diff like Special:Diff/1378122836. See Help:Diff#Special links
• Special:Redirect can link an actual file (not just the file page), or link a page, user page or log entry given an ID. See details at Special:Redirect.
• Special:Log can link a type of logs like Special:Log/block, Special:Log/delete, Special:Log/move, Special:Log/protect, Special:Log/rights, Special:Log/upload, Special:Log/patrol. The log type can be restricted to a specific user like Special:Log/move/Jimbo Wales. All logs by a user can be linked with Special:Log/Jimbo Wales. Use Special:Redirect/logid to link individual log entries like Special:Redirect/logid/97479141.
• Special:Search can link a Wikipedia search like Special:Search/cats dogs.^[3]

There are other such special pages like Special:PageHistory and Special:EditPage but the above are some of the most useful, e.g. in edit summaries where a URL doesn't produce a clickable link.

In mid-2015, Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia sites were changed to use HTTPS to encrypt all traffic. Accessing a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link will result in the webserver redirecting you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link. Therefore, when making an external-style link to an internal page (that is, using single square brackets, or a bare URL), https should be specified to avoid the needless redirect, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Link&action=history.

In the past, when Wikipedia could be accessed via either HTTP or HTTPS, a protocol-relative URL could be used to make an external link (or external-style link to an internal page) which would use http: or https: depending on how the page the link appeared on was accessed, as in [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links]. However, as all Wikimedia sites now require HTTPS, this linking style is obsolete and should no longer be used. http: or https: should be explicitly specified as appropriate for the target site (preferring https:, where available).

A link from an origin page points to either a whole target page or to a particular spot on a target page. An "anchor" is the computer code that marks a destination spot on a target page. A link to an anchor is sometimes referred to as an "anchor link".

Wikipedia automatically creates an anchor for each section and subsection heading. As discussed below, editors may also create anchors anywhere on a target page using HTML code or the {{Anchor}} and {{Visible anchor}} templates. Renaming a section or subsection changes its automatic anchor, leaving no target for pre-existing anchor links that use the old name. To preserve the old target, editors often create an anchor using the old heading name.

A link to a section title (as in the examples above) points to an HTML anchor that Wikipedia automatically generates on the target page. Editors can create anchors on smaller units of text using the {{Anchor}} template or the HTML code <span class="anchor" id="Anchor name">...</span>.

Editors create anchors to

• target a specific paragraph (see § Linking to part of a section below),
• rename a section while still allowing links to the old name to function, or
• link a section using an abbreviation (see MOS:HEADINGS for more info).

Links to anchors can also be added to external URLs and to interwiki links, again using the # syntax.

Section links still work through page names that are redirects. For example, if Danzig redirects to Gdańsk, then Danzig#History will link to the "History" section of the article Gdańsk. It is also possible for the target of a redirect to be defined as a specific section or anchor of a page (these work only if JavaScript is enabled). Indeed, according to the Manual of Style, it may be preferable to define such redirects, and use them when linking to those sections/anchors, rather than linking using the [[Page name#Section or anchor name|displayed text]] or {{Section link|Page name|Section name}} syntax. This way, if the section or anchored text later becomes its own article, links via the redirect won't need to be rewritten.

For example, Wikipedia:Section link redirects specifically to the section Help:Link#Anchors on this page. A quirk of the way this works is that if one were to add a section name when using such a link, it would override the section specified by the redirect. So Wikipedia:Section link#Interwiki links would go to the "Interwiki links" section of this page. Such overriding of section redirects should be avoided.

The {{Visible anchor}} template can be used to create an anchor that is highlighted when it is linked to (click here for an example). The template's first parameter will be used as both the anchor and the display text (|text= can be used to provide different display text).

To create an anchor for a row of a table, see Help:Tables and locations § Section link or map link to a row anchor. However, [[#top]] and [[#toc]] are reserved names that link to the top of a page and the table of contents, respectively.

An alternative to a piped link is using a redirect page. For example, it is unnecessary to say [[Mark Twain|Samuel Clemens]]. Samuel Clemens is a redirect to Mark Twain, so saying [[Samuel Clemens]] is sufficient. A minor drawback of redirects is that "Related changes" will only display the changes to the redirect page, not the redirect target.

The pipe trick uses the pipe character ("|") to automatically convert the label of a piped link for several kinds of wikilinks. This saves time and avoids potential errors. When the last character of a link is the pipe character, the software will remove the parenthesized part of the title and namespace prefixes and handle commas in the title. This processing happens after clicking "Publish", and the generated text is saved with the rest of the page's wiki markup. Just like for the three or four tildes when signing on Talk pages and the use of subst, in a preview, the result already shows up in the preview itself, but the conversion in the edit box is not yet shown. Press "Show changes" to see the change in the wikitext:

1. Any word before the first colon (:), as well as the colon itself, is removed. This word may or may not be a namespace prefix (such as "Help:") or an interwiki prefix (such as "commons:"). If the page name is preceded by a colon, "first" refers to "first after this".
2. If there is text in parentheses at the end it will be removed.
3. If there are no parentheses but there is a comma, the comma and everything after it are removed.
4. The link will remain in whatever case is used.

The pipe trick does not work in edit summaries, within <ref> tags, or with section links. In cases where the pipe trick doesn't work, the link has to be written out in full manually:

• Tracked in Phabricator
  Task T4700
  
  between "ref" tags or gallery tags, but works with {{r}} or {{refn}}. <ref>[[Roger Taylor (author)|]]</ref> renders in the references list as

• in edit summaries. :/* Section */ as tested in [[WP:SAND|]] renders in the edit history as →‎Section: as tested in WP:SAND
• Tracked in Phabricator
  Task T2845
  
  on section links and links to anchors. [[Wikipedia:Verifiability#Sources|]] renders as [[Wikipedia:Verifiability#Sources|]]

Article titles:

• [[Pipe (computing)|]] results in Pipe
• [[Nashville, Tennessee|]] results in Nashville

Pages in other namespaces:

• [[Wikipedia:Verifiability|]] results in Verifiability
• [[User:Example|]] results in Example
• [[Template:Welcome|]] results in Welcome. {{tl|Welcome}} to produce {{Welcome}} is instead preferred.
• [[:Category:Wikipedia|]] results in Wikipedia. The colon avoids categorization of the page. [[Category:Wikipedia|]] should not be used. [[Category:Wikipedia| ]] with a space after the pipe is a category sortkey and not the pipe trick.

As with all links, it is also possible to blend a suffix when using the pipe trick:

• [[pipe (computing)|]]s generates the wiki markup [[pipe (computing)|pipe]]s rendered as pipes
• [[pipe (computing)|]]mill generates the wiki markup [[pipe (computing)|pipe]]mill rendered as pipemill

Because the ampersand character (&) is disallowed, it is not possible to create an ordinary link containing &action=edit or &redirect=no in the URL query string. These kinds of links can be helpful in user pages. Also, a redirect page can have categories and you might wish to view or edit these in a single click. There are three ways to create these links:

• You can use the {{Querylink}} template to append query parameters to a Wikipedia page URL. For example, {{Querylink|Help:Link|qs=action=history|this page's history}} produces the link this page's history.
• You can use the {{Plain link}} template to encode a Wikimedia url link. For example,{{Plain link|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=79269392|name=query}} yields the link query.
• You can use the magic word fullurl. For example, to append action=edit to a URL query string you could use [{{fullurl:Help:Link|action=history}} this page's history], which renders as this page's history. Note that this will render as an external link rather than as an internal link and for this reason it might not appear in what-links-here queries associated with the target page.

Each link to a page is a link to a name.^[5] No one report shows all links to the content.

The What links here tool, on every page, will report all wikilinks and all redirects to the content of that page. (You get the wikilinks to the redirects too.) The search parameter linksto will find wikilinks only. Both report (invisible) wikilinks placed by a transclusion through a {{template}}. The difference between them is that linksto reports a count of links to a page name, while WhatLinksHere reports a map of links to the page as content.^[6]

The navigable links to a section of a page are wikilinks, redirects, and URL-styled wikilinks. The difference between a redirect and a wikilink is most pronounced where a redirect targets a section, when you cannot add your own #section  to it even though it appears as [[page name]]. A wikilink that links to a section and that appears as [[page name#section name]] can link to that section through the canonical page name (the title on the page with the actual content) or through the page name of any redirect to it, in which case the page name is the name of a redirect page.

To find wikilinks to a section requires two or more reports.

1. Show redirects only, an external tool available from the What links here page, reports redirects to the content of a section. (No matter which page name you give it, you get all the redirect page names.) Look past any "No anchor or section" group of redirects, and any "invalid" sections, to see if your particular section name is explicitly listed, because then the redirect pages under it can have incoming links that will then go to that section.^[7] ("What Links Here" also has a "show redirects" report, but it doesn't specify if the redirect goes to any particular section.)
2. Use "What Links Here" on any redirect pages found in the previous step.

The more redirects there are, the more reports there are to run. If there are no redirects involved, one report from "Links to" is enough.

To report links from a page, you simply list all the wikilinks on that page.

• Wikipedia:Tools/Editing tools § Relink can count wikilinks from a copy of the wikitext on your local machine.
• Some text editors support the counting and highlighting of the [[...]] pattern occurrences.
• The Wikipedia web API accepts queries by URL.^[8]

One way to send a query to the API is by creating an external link (§ External links). For example, using an external link very much like a search link, you can send the API a request to list the link properties of "wp:example". It should interpret it correctly as "Wikipedia:Example", pageid 25263910.

What you type

[//en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=links&pllimit=500&titles=fullpagename your label]

What you get when fullpagename is wp:example

your label

• The report is in JSON format, as is usual for RESTful APIs.
• The pageid is available from Page information on every page.
• The titles parameter is plural. (It is designed to take multiple full page names or pageid, delimited by the | pipe character.)
• The number of links returned by this query is limited to 500, per the URL you created. See mw:API:Query for how to safely get more. For example, Operating system has 510 wikilinks.

To make a page register as a link to a page, but without actually showing the link, link to it, but label it with a space character using the pipe trick: [[pagename| ]].