Help:Interlanguage links

Shortcuts

Interlanguage links are links from any page (most notably articles) in one Wikipedia language to one or more nearly equivalent or exactly equivalent pages in another Wikipedia language, between language versions of Wiktionary, and the same within Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks.

The interlanguage link feature works also on Commons, and produces links to the Wikipedias. This is not reciprocal: a link from a Wikipedia to Commons is an in-page link. They appear at one or two edges of the webpage (in Monobook on the left, in Classic at the top and bottom) after Languages, and show the names of languages for which a link is available. Interlanguage links look like external links (or different, depending on CSS), but the syntax is more like internal links. They are a form of interwiki links. See m:Meta:Interlanguage links for details on linking different languages on Meta.

Syntax

The interlanguage links take the following form:

[[language code:Title]]

where the language code is the two-letter code as per ISO 639-1. (See Complete list of language Wikipedias available. English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the English language article on Plankton, which is available on many other wikis, the interlanguage links might look like this:

[[ar:عوالق]]
[[de:Plankton]]
[[eo:Planktono]]
[[es:Plancton]]
[[fr:Plancton]]
[[nl:Plankton]]
[[ja:プランクトン]]
[[ko:플랑크톤]]
[[pl:Plankton]]
[[ru:Планктон]]
[[simple:Plankton]]
[[zh:浮游生物界]]

NOTE: These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special sidebar section "in other languages" listed by language name. Technically they can go anywhere in the article source; placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page except for the order. However, the convention is to put them at the bottom of the wikitext.

You should not include the link to the language in which you are writing.

To create an inline link (a clickable link within the text), see the section Inline interlanguage links below.

To mark one or more of these links as a featured article in a specific language, just add the Template:Link FA below right before the interlanguage links:

{{Link FA|language code}}

For example, if the Tomato article is a featured one in French and German, you should write:

{{Link FA|fr}} {{Link FA|de}}

Bots and links to and from a section

Various bots add and attempt to correct interlanguage links: if A links to B, B will be linked to A, and if A links to B and B to C, A will be linked to C. The downside is that an error in an interlanguage link in one Wikipedia propagates to other Wikipedias. Thus if a bot produces a wrong result one may have to search for the underlying error in another language version of Wikipedia.

The activity of the bots also requires that interlanguage links are only put from an article to an article covering the same subject, not more and not less. It is technically possible to make an interlanguage link from an article to a section of an article, just like any link to a section. The bots can handle this. They will not try to link back from a section to the article that links to it. Maintaining such a link by hand, however, is complicated, so linking to a section is still not recommended.

Specific languages

Hebrew and Russian

In the Hebrew Wikipedia there is a thorough project to add relevant interwiki links to all possible pages and categories or to mark them as unlikely to need an interwiki link (for example, disambiguation pages for Hebrew-only homographs). If you know Hebrew and want to help the project or if you want to learn from our experience and apply it to the Wikipedia in your language:

Chinese

In the past the Chinese Wikipedia had two versions of many articles written in Simplified and Traditional script. Nowadays the conversion between the scripts is made automatically, so there is no need for linking script-specific versions of articles. Please take a few moments to read Wikipedia:Chinese interlanguage links to avoid unnecessary extra work.

Azerbaijani

In Azerbaijani Wikipedia, after some consultations as of March 8, 2008 it was determined to write every word in the movie title with a capital letter, also to distinguish the movie titles from ordinary encyclopedic articles. This is not a binding rule in Azerbaijani language though: usually only the first letter of the opening word in the movie title is capitalized.

Particular tasks for languages

For a few other Wikipedia languages, there are lists of pages where links may be needed. For example, the English article may have a Spanish link, but the corresponding Spanish article might be missing a link to English. Most of these lists are outdated.

For more information on working with other language Wikipedias, see Wikipedia:Embassy and Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.

Tips

If you also work on a Wikipedia in another language, you might want to keep track of new pages there and check for English articles on the same subjects, so you can add a link there from here.
If you create a link to a Wikipedia that also has the interlanguage links available, please create a back-link in the other direction as well. It would also be good to copy any other interlanguage links on the two pages.
Use the exact spelling and capitalization of the foreign page title when adding an interlanguage link. Writing the title with a small letter may work correctly as a link, but interwiki bots may fail to recognize it.

Inline interlanguage links

Purpose

Ordinary interlanguage links in are only suitable for linking an existing English Wikipedia page to a corresponding page in another language Wikipedia. It is possible to make a link from a topic that does not have its own page in the English Wikipedia, to another language version of Wikipedia where it does have a page, by the method explained in the next section. However, if the subject is a good target for a future article here, then in most cases that topic should be red-linked, so that all readers are informed that the page does not exist, thus inviting its creation.

A link to another language Wikipedia conceals the non-existence of the local article unless a user actually follows the link, and the majority of users who follow such a link will not, in any event, speak the language of the page to which they have been sent. If a red link is not appropriate locally for whatever reason, such as because the subject does not appear to be notable, then linking to the other language page may be useful. Interlanguage links may also be useful outside of the mainspace for convenience, such as from one's userpage to a page frequently visited or that like-minded visitors might want to go to.

Method

You can create a clickable link that will be visible in the text by adding a colon before the language abbreviation:

[[:fr:Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle]] or [[:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端]]

You can use the pipe to show only the title:

[[:fr:Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle|Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle]] or [[:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端|井戸端]]

Which would look like this: Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle or Wikipedia:井戸端 in your text.

Interlanguage links in Talk pages and on Meta will appear inline in the text, like regular links, so you can cite other pages in discussion.
In normal articles, an inline link can be made by prefixing an extra colon as explained above, which is the method that should be used for linking to an article in another language which is not the corresponding article.
An inline link to a Wiktionary entry, normally [[wikt:Juice|]], can be directed to another language's Wiktionary like so: [[wikt:fr:Jus|]].

Interwiki links

Note that the syntax for interlanguage links differs slightly from that for linking to pages on other wikis, this concept being called InterWiki link.
The full interwiki prefixes that can be used from many wikis are :en (Example: [[:en:InterWiki]] (formerly [[WikiPedia:InterWiki]]) to directly link to the English version and MetaWikiPedia (note the capitals!).
Within Wikimedia you can also use "m" instead of MetaWikiPedia, and wiktionary and wikibooks (not wikiquote or wikisource).

Links to pages that do not exist

Links to pages on another wiki (including other Wikimedia Foundation sites) are coloured differently from links within the English Wikipedia. Unlike internal links, these links do not indicate whether the target page exists or not. If the target page does not exist, the link leads to the empty page, with a message informing you about this.

If you find blank interlanguage links on the English Wikipedia, they may be deleted as having no content or you can comment them out. It is strongly recommended that you create at least a stub page before adding interlanguage links to it. Later, interested people can translate the rest of the page content from the original language to the new one for which the link was made.

Note: if the language prefix is wrong it is considered part of the name of a page on the same wiki. Such an error is clear from how the link looks: as an internal link to a page that does or does not exist.

Sorting

The link tags should be sorted alphabetically based on the local names of the languages, as described at m:Interwiki sorting order. The vast majority of articles are currently sorted this way. Sorting alphabetically according to the two-letter language abbreviations is also acceptable. There are numerous other sorting methods to sort interlanguage links, but consistency between articles is encouraged.

Notes

Use the regular external link syntax (see Wikipedia:How to edit a page) in the following cases:
- linking from languages for which the feature is not yet available;
- if you want to specify a text in the link in addition to the language, for example if the subjects of the articles do not quite correspond.

External links