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Links are important in Wikipedia articles.
Internal links
One of the things that makes Wikipedia useful (and addictive) is extensive cross-listing by internal links. These easily-created links allow users to access information related to the article they're reading.
When to link
The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at Wikipedia articles for examples. If you're 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?"
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]]
For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia page, it would be:
- [[Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia]]
(The 'Wikipedia:' part signifies that the target page is in the Wikipedia namespace, rather than the Main namespace, where normal articles go.)
Also remember that in wikipedia the links are created automatically, so if you put double square brackets around a word, it becomes a link, and because of that you have to be careful about disambiguation.
If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can add an alternative name by adding after the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards).
For example, if you wanted to make a link to this page's sandbox, but wanted it to say "my text" you would write it as such:
- To view the article, [[Battlestar Wiki:Tutorial_(Wikipedia_links)/sandbox|my text]]...
It would appear as:
- To view the article, my text...
but would link to the sandbox.
Alternate endings
When you want to use the plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets.
For example, you would write:
- Colonial craft such as [[viper]]s....
- Various [[battlestar]]s...
It would appear as:
- Colonial craft such as vipers....
- Various battlestars...
Linking dates
Linking dates may not seem useful; however, please do 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. It 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. For more information, refer to the Categories page.
Experiment
Try it! Here's the sandbox for this page.
Continue with the tutorial.