Creating Links – MediaWiki – Wiki Tutorial

I came across this very important discovery this morning. I was attempting to edit the “About DotWiki.US” page of my Wiki when I thought a link would be nice.

Wiki syntax, Wikitext language or wiki markup is a bit different than regular HTML. I am not sure why they did it this way…perhaps because the general public is going to be the ones editing Wikis and Wiki syntax is easier and more logical (it seems).

Here is the line I put into the page editor…

DotWiki.US is a personal project aimed at learning how to use and promote a Wiki. DotWiki.US uses the same software as the widely known, [http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia].

Notice at the end of the second sentence, there is a link. Basically, an external link is enclosed in [ ]. The link above is an external link directed at Wikipedia. Inside the square brackets, the first thing you place is the actual URL. Right after that, place a space and then your link title. It’s as easy as that.

Now, for an internal link, it’s a bit different. Take a look at the paragraph in edit mode below…

While in theory any animal might be a pet, in practice only a small number of species of [[mammal|mammals]] (especially [[dog|dogs]] and [[cat|cats]]) and other small animals, such as [[bird|birds]], [[fish]], or [[lizard|lizards]], are practical. One reason for this is that large animals are not able to fit inside small dwellings.

You’ll notice a few different types of links in there. If you want to make an internal link in your Wiki to another page in your Wiki, simply find out the name of the page. Here, we will look at the “fish” link (end of first sentence). The name of the page this person wants to link to is called, “fish.” Therefore, a double [[ ]] is used with the name right in between. That’s pretty straightforward.

Where it gets a little more tricky is when you want an internal link to a page with a different page name than your link title. Lets look at the “mammals” link above (first link). The page name is “mammal” but the link text in the sentence is “mammals.” Basically, to get this result, you need to again use the [[ ]] with the page name you are linking to typed in first, with the link text you want to appear in your paragraph second.

Does that make sense?