Help:Interlanguage links

In addition to the general external link feature, it is possible to add interlanguage links into articles. They allow a visitor to easily hop from the article in one language to the same subject in one of the others, see Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.

Languages

At the moment, these links work from the Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Interlingua, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Nahuatl, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simple English, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh wikis; as the software is adapted for other languages the others will be upgraded and a full back-and-forth network can be put in place.

Because Chinese has two versions (Simplified and Traditional), please take a few moments to read Wikipedia:Chinese interlanguage links to avoid unnecessary extra work to clean up the undesirable aftermass.

Syntax

The interlanguage links take the following form:

[[language code:Title]]

where the language code is the 2-letter code as per ISO 639. (See Complete list of language wikis available. English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the article on Esperanto, which is available on a lot of other wikis, the interlanguage links would look like so:

[[de:Esperanto]] [[en:Esperanto]] [[es:Esperanto]] [[eo:Esperanto]] [[fr:Espéranto]] [[nl:Esperanto]] [[ja:エスペラント]] [[pl:Esperanto]] [[ro:Esperanto]] [[simple:Esperanto]]

These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special header section "Other languages:" listed by language name. They can go anywhere in the article source; they used to be placed at the top, however this was somewhat problematic -- it was confusing for newbie editors, and the links often showed up in search results where one would have preferred to see body text. For this reason, it is required to put the language links at the bottom of the page, along with external links and 'see also's. Placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page in any way; they are listed at both the top and the bottom.

(You should not include the link to the language you're writing in.)

Tips

If you work also on a Wikipedia in another language (and if you don't, you should, see Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination) 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 the other interlanguage links on the two pages.
Sort interlanguage links alphabetically!

Inline interlanguage links

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 - e.g. [[:nl:Hond]] produces nl:Hond. This method should be used for linking to an article in another language which is not the corresponding article.

Interwiki links

Note that the syntax for interlanguage links is similar to that for linking to pages on other wikis: InterWiki links.
The full interwiki prefixes that can be used from many wikis are WikiPedia (for 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 website (another wiki or elsewhere) have an other color than links within the wiki, but without distinction between an existing and a non-existing page. However, if the 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 internal link to a page that does or does not exist. Links from pages which do not exist may be deleted for having no content. See See also : wikipedia:blank page idiomatic link.

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.

Depending on your browser, you may not be able to simply cut-n-paste the text of article names into the Latin1-based wikis (English, German, French, etc) from non-Latin1 wikis (Japanese, Esperanto, Polish, etc). In that case, you can copy the %XX hex codes from the URL, or use some external program to convert the Unicode text into numeric HTML entities. Some web browsers (in particular newer versions of Internet Explorer) automatically convert cut-and-pasted Unicode into numeric HTML entities; this is not official HTML standard, and you will have to check by hand whether your browser does this or not.

Examples:

[[eo:Eŭropa Unio]] or [[eo:E%C5%ADropa Unio]] (Esperanto Eŭropa Unio; also X-system backwards compatibility, eg [[eo:Euxropa Unio]])

[[pl:Wojna amerykańsko-meksykańska]] or [[pl:Wojna ameryka%C5%84sko-meksyka%C5%84ska]] (Polish Wojna amerykańsko-meksykańska; (also backwards compatibilty with Latin-2: [[pl:Wojna ameryka%F1sko-meksyka%F1ska]])

[[ja:&19990;界の国]] or [[ja:%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E3%81%AE%E5%9B%BD]] (Japanese 世界の国; Unicode only)

If at some point this system becomes difficult to manage, a tool will be set up for conveniently updating the link sets between wikis to keep things consistent.