Wiktionary:Links

Wiktionary's readers benefit greatly from relevant links; however, some care must be taken in order to ensure maximum readability and usability. The links in Wiktionary entries mostly fall into four groups:


 * links within the project (to entries, appendices, category pages, and so on).
 * links to pages in sister projects (Wikipedia articles, entries in foreign-language Wiktionaries, and so on).
 * links to primary sources — sources that use a headword.
 * links to references (secondary sources) — works that explicitly support our claims about a headword, such as other dictionaries.

Different considerations apply to each of these, and they are addressed separately here.

Links within the project
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Topics that should perhaps be mentioned here:


 * De-coloring links in inflection tables.
 * Pipe-linking to lemmata and to uncapitalized forms.
 * Links within headwords in inflection lines.
 * Pipe-linking directly to language sections.
 * Explicit wikilinks in form-of templates.
 * See-also links.
 * Link templates —, etc.

(Note that some of these topics might be better covered at Entry layout. Or, maybe Entry layout should link here.)

Links to pages in sister projects
Link to sister projects are encouraged, and come in three basic types: (1) in-line links in text, (2) further information links, and (3) interwiki links.

In-line links
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In-line text links are included within text to relevant information on our sister projects, especially Wikipedia. There are a number of shortcuts for linking to specific projects. If Wiktionary does not have an entry for a term, especially if the term is unlikely to meet our criteria for inclusion, consider inserting a link to an appropriate Wikipedia article (or section thereof).

Some common uses of inline links include:


 * Expansions of acronyms and initialisms. Often the definition of the expanded form is either self-explanatory or outside the scope of a dictionary, but a user might want more information about the topic.
 * Language-names in etymologies. We do have entries for language names, but the Wikipedia article about the language is typically much more relevant. The, , and templates can be used to provide a link to this article, and to add the appropriate categories at the same time.
 * Translation tables. Ordinarily we link to both our own entry on the foreign-language word, and the foreign-language Wiktionary's entry on that word (or the page where that entry will go, once it is created). We do this using the template (as well as its specialized counterparts  and, which human editors don't need to worry about: they're managed by a bot). Use of these templates is explained in detail at Translations.
 * Quotations. Names of authors should be links to the relevant Wikipedia articles, if they exist (using the format  name of author ); titles of works should generally be links either to the relevant Wikisource pages (using the format  title of work ) or to the relevant Wikipedia articles (using an analogous format), if they exist; and chapter/section numbers should be links to the relevant page on Wikisource (ditto), if it exists. (See Quotations for details on quotation formatting.)

Further information links
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Further information links include a number of templates for sister project linking. Some are boxy templates that float at the right of the page. Others are for use in bulleted lists of "external" links.

Headword links
For English words, links to the English Wikipedia are valuable for fuller explanations. Headword links are the simplest. One popular approach is to include at the beginning of the English language section, which produces a box like the one at right, and also adds a link to the sidebar at left. Alternatively, it may be useful to have such a link in "Further reading"; the template can be used. It produces a link in the format:



and also adds a link to the sidebar. (Note that for it to appear properly as a list item, it must be preceded with an asterisk * in the wiki-code.) In all cases, links to Wikipedia should be to good articles, or to disambiguation pages that link to multiple good articles: as with all links, they should only be included if it is worthwhile for a user to follow them.

For words in other languages with Wikipedias, a similar approach may be taken; each of the above-mentioned templates takes a  parameter whose value may be set to a language code controlling which Wikipedia is linked to. For example, would link to the Finnish Wikipedia:



Interwiki links
Interwiki links connect entries, categories, templates and other pages on Wiktionary to their equivalents on other Wiktionary projects (such as the French Wiktionary). This is similar to how they work in Wikipedia, Wikiquote and other projects. For most users, these links display to the left of the page content in a section entitled "in other languages". The links appear as the native name of the language in which the target page is written. Unique to Wiktionary, however, is that entries of the dictionary always interwiki link to identically-named entries, e.g. mare on English Wiktionary links to mare on French Wiktionary, not to the French translation of that English word (as would have been the case in Wikipedia).

The maintenance of these links in Wiktionary changed radically in the summer of 2017. Before, the links were wikitext at the end of each page, maintained by bots. Now, entry interwiki links (to all existing identically-named entries) are created automatically by means of Mediawiki extension Cognate, while interwiki links to categories, templates and other pages (such as this one) are stored in Wikidata (just like Wikipedia's interwiki links).

To make a link in a Wiktionary article to the Wikipedia article (especially in the case where there is no Wiktionary article for the subject of the link), use this code: example.

To link to the "surfeit" Wiktionary entry from Wikipedia, you would include the wikilink markup  which would appear as surfeit or the wikilink markup   which would appear as surfeit.

Links to primary sources
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See Quotations.

Links to references
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