Wikipedia:Interlanguage links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Interlanguage links are links from an article in one Wikipedia language to the same subject in another Wikipedia language, between language versions of Wiktionary, and the same within Wikiquote and Wikibooks.
The interlanguage link feature works also on Commons, and produces links to the Wikipedias. This is not reciprocal: a link from a Wikipedia to Commons is an in-page link.
They appear at one or two edges of the webpage (in Monobook on the left, in Classic at the top and bottom) after Other languages:, and show the names of languages for which a link is available. Interlanguage links look like external links (or different, depending on CSS), but the syntax is more like internal links. They are a form of interwiki links. See m:Meta:Interlanguage links for details on linking different languages on Meta.
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Syntax
The interlanguage links take the following form:
- [[language code:Title]]
where the language code is the two-letter code as per ISO 639-1. (See Complete list of language Wikipedias available. English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the article on Esperanto, which is available on a lot of other wikis, the interlanguage links would look like so:
- [[de:Esperanto]] [[en:Esperanto]] [[es:Esperanto]] [[eo:Esperanto]] [[fr:Espéranto]] [[nl:Esperanto]] [[ja:エスペラント]] [[pl:Esperanto]] [[ro:Esperanto]] [[simple:Esperanto]]
These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special header footer sidebar section "in other languages" listed by language name. They can go anywhere in the article source; they used to be placed at the top, however this was somewhat problematic — it added excess whitespace to the top, was confusing for newbie editors, and the links often showed up in search results where one would have preferred to see body text. For this reason, it is required to put the language links at the bottom of the page, after external links, see-alsos, and categories. Placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page except for the order.
(You should not include the link to the language you're writing in.)
Specific languages
In the past the Chinese Wikipedia had two versions of many articles written in Simplified and Traditional script. Nowadays the conversion between the scripts is made automatically, so there is no need for linking script-specific versions of articles. Please take a few moments to read Wikipedia:Chinese interlanguage links to avoid unnecessary extra work.
For a few other Wikipedia languages, there are lists of pages where links may be needed. For example, the English article may have a Spanish link, but the corresponding Spanish article might be missing a link to English. Lists to work on include:
For more information on working with other language Wikipedias, see Wikipedia:Embassy and Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.
Tips
- If you also work on a Wikipedia in another language, you might want to keep track of new pages there and check for English articles on the same subjects, so you can add a link there from here.
- If you create a link to a Wikipedia that also has the interlanguage links available, please create a back-link in the other direction as well. It would also be good to copy any other interlanguage links on the two pages.
Inline interlanguage links
- Interlanguage links in talk pages and on Meta will appear inline in the text, like regular links, so you can cite other pages in discussion.
- In normal articles, an inline link can be made by prefixing an extra colon - e.g. [[:nl:Hond]] produces nl:Hond. This method should be used for linking to an article in another language which is not the corresponding article.
- An inline link to a Wiktionary entry, normally [[wikt:Juice|Juice]], can be directed to another language's Wiktionary like so: [[wikt:fr:Jus|Jus]].
Interwiki links
- Note that the syntax for interlanguage links differs slightly from that for linking to pages on other wikis, this concept being called InterWiki link.
- The full interwiki prefixes that can be used from many wikis are :en (Example: [[:en:InterWiki]] (formerly [[WikiPedia:InterWiki]]) to directly link to the English version and MetaWikiPedia (note the capitals!).
- Within Wikimedia you can also use "m" instead of MetaWikiPedia, and wiktionary and wikibooks (not wikiquote or wikisource).
See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (sister projects), list of language codes
Links to pages that do not exist
Links to pages on another wiki (including other Wikimedia sites) are coloured differently from links within the English Wikipedia. Unlike internal links, these links do not indicate whether the target page exists or not. If the target page does not exist, the link will take you to a blank page that has no content. This indicates that an article about the subject has not yet been written in the language concerned.
If you find blank interlanguage links on the English Wikipedia, they may be deleted as having no content or you can comment them out. It is strongly recommended that you create at least a stub page before adding interlanguage links to it. Later, interested people can translate the rest of the page content from the original language to the new one for which the link was made.
Note: if the language prefix is wrong it is considered part of the name of a page on the same wiki. Such an error is clear from how the link looks: as an internal link to a page that does or does not exist.
Notes
- Use the regular external link syntax (see Wikipedia:How to edit a page) in the following cases:
- linking from languages for which the feature is not yet available;
- if you want to specify a text in the link in addition to the language, for example if the subjects of the articles do not quite correspond.
