Wikipedia:Tutorial (Wikipedia links)

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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.

When to link

The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at Wikipedia articles for examples. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself "If I were reading this article, would the link be useful to me?" Usually link the first, and only the first, occurrence of a word/term in the article, that does not have an implicitly understood definition.

How to link

When you want to make a link to another Wikipedia page (called a wiki link) you have to put it in double square brackets, like this:

[[Sandbox]] = Sandbox

If you want the display text of the link to have a different title, 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

You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:

[[Target page#Target section|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.

Linking dates

Linking dates may not seem useful; however, please link dates since it enables the use of a user preference in how dates are displayed. An unlinked date, like July 13, 2004, will always be displayed in that manner. If you link the date:

[[July 13]], [[2004]]

Wikipedia will display it in one of the following ways:

July 13, 2004

13 July 2004

2004 July 13

2004-07-13

-according to the preference set by the individual user. (This feature is only available to logged-in users and only works if the date is linked.)

Categories

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.

To make a link to a Category page (for example, as a reference for further research), simply put a colon (:) at the beginning of the "Category" tag, like this:

[[:Category:Astrophysics]]

The above code would produce the following:

Category:Astrophysics

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.