Help:Links

A link has various (changeable) appearances on the "anchor" page, and the "target" page, which owns the "backlinks", and which can count the links to it with the WP:What links here tool.

For a short list of some basic shortcuts, see .

Use a vertical bar "|" (the "pipe" symbol — see for how to type one) to create a link while labelling it with a different name on the original page. The first term inside the brackets is the link (the page you would be taken to), while anything you type after the vertical bar is what that link looks like on the original page. Here are some examples:

Links with a specified label are said to be "piped" because the pipe symbol is used ("|"). For certain types of link, the label will be generated automatically if a pipe is typed, even with no label after it (meaning you don't have to type one). See Help:Pipe trick.

The link target is case-sensitive except for the first character (so [[atom]] links to "Atom" but [[ATom]] does not). Other ways in which link targets are reinterpreted are described further: Conversion to canonical form.

If the target of a link is the same as the page on which it appears (a self-link), it is displayed in bold font, as with: Help:Link.

Attempting to link normally to an image page, category page or interlanguage link will produce a different effect: this will respectively place the image on the page, add the page to the category, or create an interlanguage link at the edge of the page. To override this behavior, insert an initial colon ":", as in , [[:Category:Help]], [[:fr:Help:Link]].

For example, [[m:Help:Link]] links to the "Help:Link" page on Meta, while [[:commons:Athens]] links to page "Athens" on as: .

External links use absolute URLs to link directly to any Web page. These links have the associated CSS class "external". External links are in the form [http://www.example.org link name] (resulting in link name), with the link name separated from the URL by a space and followed by an external link icon. Links without link names appear numbered: [http://www.example.org] becomes: [1]. Links with no square brackets display in their entirety: http://www.example.org.

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