User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/SOL 2012/Links
Linking Wikipedia articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to Wikipedia's utility.
How to link
[edit]
To make a link to another Wikipedia page (called a wiki link), put it in double square brackets, like this:
- [[Sandbox]] = Sandbox
If you want to link to an article, but display some other text for the link, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:
- [[Target page|display text]] = display text
If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:
- ''[[War and Peace]]'' = War and Peace
Please check your links to ensure they point to the correct article. For example, Apple points to the article about the fruit, while Apple, Inc. is the title of the article about the computer manufacturer. There are also "disambiguation" pages—these are not articles, but pages which contain links to articles with similar titles. Some, such as Apple (disambiguation) are obvious, while others such as Georgia use generic titles. These differing titles make piped links especially useful, as a link to Georgia (country) is far less readable than a piped link called Georgia.
When to link
[edit]Adding links to an article makes it more useful, but too many links can be distracting. This is why you should only link the first occurrence of a word. Lead sections can have more links.
Looking at other Wikipedia articles can also help you learn when to add links. See the featured articles page for a list of high quality articles.
Categories
[edit]You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.
It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about a type of tree, you may look at an article on another type of tree to see which categories could be appropriate.
Some categories can also be used on user pages, to group together editors. For example, you could add Category:Wikipedians interested in science (or perhaps one of its more specialist subcategories) to the bottom of your user page.