Help:Wikilinks

(Redirected from Help:WikiLinks)

Wikilinks are links embedded in articles that take the user to other related articles. A certain word or phrase is linked to an article about that topic. Thus, a reader who is unfamiliar with a term or subject can follow the wikilink to learn more about it and improve his or her understanding of the original article.

  • Working wikilinks will appear as blue text. For example, in this sentence, New Avalon is a wikilink to the article about the planet New Avalon. After the link has been visited, it will change color to purple to reflect this.
  • Sometimes the text of a link will be red, which means that the article it should link to has not yet been created (ex: Seaman Timmy). Authors will sometimes create links to nonexistent articles so that they or someone else will create the article later.

Usage[edit]

  • The most basic way to insert a wikilink is to enclose a word or phrase that is an article title in double brackets: [[ ]]. For example, the link to the New Avalon article above is formatted [[New Avalon]]. Since "New Avalon" is the name of an article, it will link directly to that article.
  • With these basic wikilinks, it is important to make sure the text you link is the same as the article title. If you linked, for example, [[NewAvalon]] or [[New Avalon planet]], these wouldn't go to the article because neither of those is the correct article name.
  • Capitalization of a single word isn't important, so if the article title is "Lasers" you can still link with "lasers".
  • A given article should generally only be linked once in an article. Otherwise the article will contain an excessive number of links.

Plurals and possessives[edit]

  • Sometimes you might want to link to an article which is titled in the singular form, but in the sentence you would like to link from, the word is in plural or possessive form. For example, "The Inner Sphere 'Mechs couldn't stand up to the Timber Wolf's superior firepower." In this case, you simply place all the extra characters outside the brackets, like so: [[Timber Wolf]]'s will show as Timber Wolf's.

Advanced usage[edit]

  • Sometimes you may wish to link to an article that is not directly named where you are trying to link it. For example, this page is named "Help:WikiLinks" but you may have a sentence that says "Most articles contain wikilinks". In this case, you can't simply link "wikilinks" because it is not the correct article title. For this situation, you use a specially formatted link which displays different text. The format is [[realtitle|displayedtext]], so for example you would link "wikilinks" in the above sentence like so:[[Help:WikiLinks|wikilinks]].

Automatically Adding Wikilinks[edit]

Contact Nicjansma if you want to use a tool that automatically creates wikilinks for BattleTech articles (based on a long list of keywords, terms, characters, places, etc in the BattleTech universe).