Wiktionary:LDL/Link Guide

This page provides guidance on how to create links to various pages on English Wiktionary, other language versions of Wiktionary and on other Wiki projects. This page is part of the Limited Documentation Languages project.

Converting a word to a link on Wiktionary or any other Wiki project is part of what is called "wikification." The Wiktionary Tutorial includes instructions on how to create links. This page also provides guidance on making links.

The basic symbols used for links are brackets [ ]. (Braces "{ }" have other uses such as templates.) Another common symbol is the pipe symbol | often found near the enter or return key on the keyboard.

Linking to English Wiktionary words

 * See also Help:Internal links.

To link to the English word "dog" on Wiktionary, simply use two brackets before and after the word.

Note: For help on displaying text different from the link, see the section "How to link to article X but show text Y" below.

Linking to English Wikipedia articles
To link to the English article on Wikipedia for "dog," use the same style link, but add "w:" for Wikipedia.

Note: Wikipedia articles start with capital letters by default. If you use a small letter instead, Wikipedia will automatically redirect. Wiktionary entries start with capitals or small letters according to the spelling of the word.

Linking to words on other language versions of Wiktionary
For words on Wiktionary, but on different language versions, you need to find the first letters of the URL, usually two or three letters. For example, the first letters of the URL on this page are "en" meaning "English," the first letters of all the Spanish Wiktionary pages are "es" (Español) and the first letters of the French Wiktionary are "fr". See Wiktionary on the Meta-Wiki site for a list of language codes.

Linking to articles on other language versions of Wikipedia
To link to a Wikipedia article in a different language, combine the "w:" for Wikipedia with the colon + language code + colon.

Linking to other Wiki projects
Link as in the section immediately above, but substitute the "w:" of Wikipedia with the abbreviation for the Wiki project you want to link to. Here are some of the Wiki projects and their abbreviations:


 * Wikipedia – w
 * Wikibooks – b
 * Wikiquote – q
 * Wikisource – s
 * MediaWiki – mw

See Manual: Interwiki for a complete list of Wiki project links and technical details.

Linking to webpages outside of Wiki projects
To link to a URL (Internet address) outside of the Wiki projects, use one set of brackets instead of two. You must include the "http://" part.

Note: Each external link on the page is numbered sequentially (unless other text is provided; see next section). The arrow appears automatically, indicating to the reader that it's an external link.

How to link to article X but show text Y
Frequently, it makes it easier for the reader to show different text than the actual link. For example, if your sentence has "dogs," but you want to link to the article for "dog," you can do that.


 * For Wiki links, use the pipe character "|" between the link page and the text to display. The pipe character is a vertical line often located on the keyboard near the "enter" key, and is the shifted version of the "\" character.

Note: This does not work for languages that do not use spaces, like Japanese and Chinese (to avoid the rest of the paragraph being linked).
 * For endings, like the "s" in "dogs" or the "ing" in "barking," you can also simply put brackets around the entry part.


 * For links outside of Wikipedia, simply type a space followed by the text to display.

Return to the Limited Documentation Languages Project.