Wikipedia:Piped link

Piped links are useful for preserving the grammatical structure and flow of a sentence when:

There is disagreement about whether it is appropriate to pipe year numbers to "year-in-x" articles (such as [[2006 in sports|2006]]). According to the :

Another possibility is to link to a more specific article about that year, for example [[2006 in sports|2006]], although some people find this unintuitive because the link leads to an unexpected destination.

First of all, keep links as simple as possible:

The readers will not see the hidden reference to Thomas Bowdler unless they click or hover over the piped exceptions link. In a print version, there is no link to select, and the reference is lost. Instead, reference the article explicitly:

Similarly, instead of:

consider:

or simply:

It will occasionally be useful to link to a fuller explanation of a phrase; when this is done, link the phrase, not a single word.

If Pontiac's War is defined as having been

and there is no space for further explanation in that context (this is a quote from the lead of the article), then some readers will value a link to a description of the confederation. This should not be linked from the word confederation; the link in the following phrase:

looks like a link to the article Confederation. At a minimum, link something that wouldn't be the title of an article under our article title conventions:

Further, it is inappropriate to contain veiled and uncited interpretations of fiction through piped links, as in this excerpt from the The Iron Dream article, which contained over 30 interpretations hidden in links:

Such interpretation, if properly sourced, should be placed in its own section and citations provided. If the interpretation is purely that of the editor, it is original research and should be removed.

In the case of a category link, a piped link serves to sort the article alphabetically within the category. For example, to place Albert Einstein in Category:Physicists, you can link the article to [[Category:Physicists|Einstein, Albert]], and the category will then alphabetize him under Einstein rather than Albert.

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