Help:Links
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| Case Wiki Help | |
|---|---|
| Category | Articles |
| General | FAQ | Terminology | Common Mistakes | Creating Articles |
| Basic Editing | Links | Categories | Organizing | Discussion | Redirects |
| Advanced | Images | Moving/Renaming | Templates | Footnotes Watching | Reverting | Math formula | Extensions | Semantics |
| Tutorials | Beginner | Basic editing | Advanced editing |
[edit] About Links
Links are pointers to a resource somewhere on the internet. This resource could be a web page, an image, or even other pages in this wiki. A good rule of thumb is to create links for as many nouns as possible in the document you are writing. This way, people reading that page can easily find information about related topics.
A basic knowledge of how MediaWiki handles links is necessary to edit pages. The sections below outline how to create links in MediaWiki.
[edit] Linking to a Case Wiki Topic
If you are editing a page that you just want to point to another page, use redirects.
[edit] The Traditional Method
When creating links to topics covered on Case Wiki, simply type the title of the page inside a double set of square brackets. MediaWiki will create the link for you automatically. The text that appears will be the title of the article to which you linked.
What you type:[[Page Title]]
What you see: Page Title
[edit] Changing the Text That is Displayed
Say you want to change the text that is displayed when you link to an internal topic. Just include the "|" (pipe) character followed by the text to be displayed.
What you type:[[Page Title|Text to be displayed]]
What you see: Text to be displayed
Example:[[Case Western Reserve University|Case]]
is displayed as: Case
[edit] Plural Nouns
Say you are typing along and you wish to create a link to another entry. The title of this entry is in its singular form, but you need to use the plural form to make a sentence gramatically correct. You could link to the plural form and create a redirect to the singular form. Since this is generally frowned upon, we will just append some text to after the closing double square brackets.
What you type:[[Page Title]]suffix
What you see: Page Titlesuffix
Example:[[student]]s
is displayed as: students
Text after the closing brackets in no way affects the link itself.
[edit] Sections Within a Page
A well organized page will probably be divided into sections. Suppose you wish to link to an individual section instead of the whole page itself. MediaWiki handles this much like HTML in that is uses the "#" character to denote sections.
What you type:[[Page Title#Section Name]]
What you see: Page Title#Section Name
Example:[[Help:Editors#Creating Links]]
is displayed as Help:Editors#Creating Links
If you wish to link to a section on the same page, you can omit the page title and just include the #Section.
What you type:[[#Section Name]]
What you see: #Section Name
Example:[[#Creating Links]]
is displayed as #Creating Links
[edit] Linking to Content in a Separate Namespace
Sometimes it is necessary to link to a page/topic that is not in the namespace of the topic which you are editing. It may be necessary to directly specify the namespace of the page.
NOTE You do not need to specify the namespace for content in the Case namespace. If the namespace is omitted, it is assumed that this is the namespace.
To define the namespace explicity, simply put the name of the namespace followed by a colon directly preceding the topic title.
What you type:[[Namespace:Topic]]
What you see: Namespace:Topic
Example:[[Special:Recentchanges]]
Is displayed as: Special:Recentchanges
If the namespace given does not exist, you will be asked to edit a page whose topic actually contains a colon. BE CAREFUL!
[edit] Using Blog@Case
The Blog@Case system will accept the Wiki link syntax during entries and will automatically convert the wiki-style link to a link to this wiki. Currently supported syntax formats are:
-
[[Topic Name]]
-
[[Topic Name|Display Text]]
[edit] Linking to External Resources
[edit] Linking to Another Wiki
MediaWiki supports interwiki linking, which is linking to topics and pages on other wikis. You may want to do this if you are creating a references list for a page.
The first step to interwiki linking is finding out the prefix of the wiki to which you want to link. On the Case Wiki, this list can be found at WikiPedia's Meta Wiki. In addition, the Case Wiki may use some Custom Interwiki Links. Once this is done, you can link to any topic on these wikis by creating a link that begins with a colon, followed by the wiki prefix, followed by another colon, followed by the topic name. The prefix is case sensitive.
What you type:[[:prefix:Topic Name]]
What you see: prefix:Topic Name
Example: To link to Wikipedia's entry on The Beatles, type
[[:WikiPedia:The Beatles]]
is displayed as WikiPedia:The Beatles
[edit] The Lazy Method
When editing a page, if you simply type a URL like you would in a browser, MediaWiki will recognize this link and turn it into a link automatically. There is no need to specify HTML tags when creating links of this type.
What you type:http://www.case.edu
What you see: http://www.case.edu
[edit] The Proper Method
The proper method to link to an external resource is to enclose the URL in a single set of square brackets. Inside the brackets, preferred text may be given. This is useful if the link is long. This method is preferred because MediaWiki will index this link and show a counter next to the link which corresponds to the number of pages on the wiki which link to that same URL.
What you type:[http://somewhere.com link text]
What you see: link text
Example:[http://admission.case.edu Undergraduate Admission]
is displayed as Undergraduate Admission
[edit] Numbered Links
This style of link is useful when citing external Web sites as sources.
What you type:Tomatoes are red. [http://www.tomato.org/]
What you see: Tomatoes are red. [1]
It is also possible to cite resources using Footnotes.
[edit] Miscellaneous Linking Tips
[edit] Combination of Methods
A lot of the methods explained in the above sections can be combined. This especially holds true for the functionality that the "|" (pipe) character provides. Although not explicitly states, the character can be used on any type of link, assuming it is surrounded by double square brackets.
[edit] Other Resources
Please see the following if you want more info: