User:Proteins/Wikilinks tutorial

The typical Wikipedia article is peppered throughout by blue words and phrases, often on slightly obscure topics. These are called "internal" links or wikilinks; clicking on them will open another article that describes the concept in more detail. Thus, if you're reading along and encounter a word you've never heard before or a concept that you've always wanted to understand, you can interrupt your reading briefly to click on the wikilink and read about it. This tutorial summarizes how to create and modify such article links

Basics

Wikilinks are created by enclosing the article text in double square brackets. For example, [[dog]] produces dog, a link to the article on dogs.

The text shown to the reader need not resemble the name of the article. The simplest changes to the apparent text can be done by appending letters after the closing double bracket, with no space inbetween. For example, [[dog]]s produces dogs, a link to the article on dogs, but now spelled "dogs". Similarly, you could write [[dog]]gy to produce doggy. Note that the extra letters go outside the double brackets.

In other cases, the article title may bear no resemblance to the desired link text. In such cases, you can specify the shown text within the square brackets by adding the text after a vertical bar (a "pipe" symbol |) after the article name. For example, [[dog|a faithful quadruped]] produces a faithful quadruped, which links to the dog article but which says "a faithful quadruped" instead.