Help talk:Interwiki linking

Interlinking between files
Interlinking between files - this information needs to much easier for the newbie to find for the commons to actually be useful to other wikimedia projects. I had to go to about ten different help pages before I found this piece of information, which should be very easy to find. The less dedicated user would just give up. Cheers 150.203.230.27 23:08, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki link to Wikipedia
The page currently shows the long-form link to be [[wikipedia:]]. Are four brackets required, or just double brackets on each side? Newportm (talk) 01:07, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
 * No response to this post, so I changed it to be consistent within the article. –Newportm (talk • contribs) 14:38, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Link to Wikinfo
Is it possible to put up a link to Wikinfo? I'd say that as many as 50% of my red links in articles are to people who wouldn't pass the 'notability' threshhold. If a person is in a more specialized dictionary (like the Canadian Encyclopedia of Music or the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia), then I'll put in an EL to that encyclopedia; but other, more senior editors have complained about that EL's in body text, referring me to WP:EL (which I've read), and one has even tried removing them. EL's to Wikinfo would be no better; a bit worse, actually); but interwiki links to Wikinfo look like a solution. George Dance (talk) 17:04, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
 * These would have to be external links, because Wikinfo is not run by the WikiMedia Foundation. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:10, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Then they'll have to be EL's. I can't see any other way to satisfy the double standard. George Dance (talk) 01:36, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It already exists; viz: Encyclopedia gives Encyclopedia, or, using a piped link, OR welcome gives OR welcome. Voilà.
 * A linking mechanism to external websites which is very similar to interwiki linking can be established through Interwiki map where almost 400 of those are defined. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:17, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Inline interlanguage links
I have just added two inline interlanguage links to a source in the article Classical antiquity. Can I rely on these inline interlanguage links being turned into links within the English Wikipedia, automatically, once there will have been created articles on the linked topics, also in the English Wikipedia, and once such new English articles will have been connected to the foreign articles by the usual interlanguage links on the left side of the page? --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 15:10, 18 July 2011 (UTC)
 * No. You have to rely on the creators of these articles to search for other articles in which the newly created articles occur and that they will change the links from inline interwiki links to local links. You can help by putting the red link, say Veit Valentin, on your watchlist. Alternatively, you can use the template Link-interwiki to create two links: one to an English article (which is red until it exists), and one to a foreign language: will display as: . -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:28, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank You! That is a very valuable hint. I see why interlanguage links are not automatically replaced by such to newly available English articles, very well, now that I think about it a little more thoroughly. One never knows if the new article also contains, or contains with the same clarity, what one has intended to explain with the help of the linked page. --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 22:09, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I have conducted this at Classical antiquity. One more question: what do I have to do when I...
 * a) ...want to link to more than only one foreign article this way? In the reference to the Classical antiquity article that You see in the above link, I think it would make sense to link as well to nl:Allert de Lange as to de:Allert de Lange Verlag, shortly after the mentioning of Veit Valentin. The Dutch article gives a detailed account of de Lange`s life, while the German describes the publishers company, which is difficult to find out about in the Dutch.
 * b) ...see that the catchword of the foreign article runs different than the English?
 * --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 22:24, 19 July 2011 (UTC)
 * ad a): You can and should only create inline interwiki links to one other language; it's then up to the reader to follow the sidebar interwiki links from that article.
 * ad b): See the documentation of Link-interwiki: gives . -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:04, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I could have looked up these technical details, there, myself. Thank You for explaining them, nonetheless! — Has there been a discussion about the usefulness of links to articles in more than one further language by such small superior letters? One could, at least in references, where the outer appearance of the text is not so crucial, hint by that to the fact that there are two good articles on different aspects of the subject, quicker. --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 14:59, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not aware of any discussion about inline linking to more than one further language. I don't think that's a good idea because it would produce a cluttered layout. In fact, my preferred method of inline interwiki linking is simply Veit Valentin (Veit Valentin) which produces a link in a slightly different shade of blue. The disadvantage is that it doesn't produce a red link which would alert editors to write that article. Such a red link also produces a count of "what links here" (e.g. Special:WhatLinksHere/Veit Valentin) which is useful in gauging the importance and need of such article. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:26, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You are for sure right. It would get too complicated.
 * After all, I, for my part, am probably going to use the method that You have shown me, here — with one link in small superior letters — from time to time. When I make new articles myself, I of course look up where the catchword is contained, but I don`t necessarily plan to make articles on every catchword that I redlink and would fear that the one who, eventually, makes such articles would refrain from turning the link into one within the English Wikipedia, out of courtesy. Thanks, again, for the information! --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 21:55, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Commons category
Can a link be set up to allow Wikipedia to link to Wikicommons without a redirect on Template:Sister_project_links e.g. Jesus currently redirecting to commons category via Jesus? Can a commons cat: be established? Nirvana2013 (talk) 14:13, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
 * We already have this: see . -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:49, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes I have used this. The problem arises when using Template:Sister_project_links. Here the link goes through to commons, not commons cat, which they say "are taken from Help:Interwiki linking". Nirvana2013 (talk) 16:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
 * obtains its links from the page name, alternatively from certain parameters, not from any interwikis. When placed on Jesus, by default the commons link will be to Jesus (in what commons refer to as "gallery space"). This link can be disabled, by specifying no - or it may be amended, by using the same parameter but specifying a different value. So, in, you could add Category:Jesus. There is no point to this though, because commons:Category:Jesus is presently a soft redirect to commons:Category:Jesus Christ - which is the same page that Jesus redirects to. -- Red rose64 (talk) 17:06, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Nirvana2013 (talk) 17:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Interwiki table log
I've been puzzled for some time that Special:Log/interwiki does not show changes to the interwiki table like it does on other wikis, even though there is most certainly an interwiki table and there have been changes to it. I looked at Interwiki hoping I would find something to shed some light on this, but instead I was redirected to this page. Does anyone know what became of the interwiki table log? Cathfolant (talk) 22:37, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Add link
"Pages with their interlanguage links on Wikidata display an "Edit links" button under the language list." If there are no links then the text states "add links". Adding links is much easier than editing; can we add the add link button (link) to articles with edit links one? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:41, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think that we can. The difference, as I understand it, depends upon whether or not a Wikidata page exists, regardless of what is on that Wikidata page. So something would need to be done to the Wikidata handler in the MediaWiki software, which we can't alter here, and so it means filing a feature request at . -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:33, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I've started a discussion at Village_pump_(proposals). User:Redrose64, perhaps you could repost your comment there. If we can get several people to say it's a good idea, we could send it up to developers, I am sure it would be an easy fix. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 10:05, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Interwiki
The help page gives a lot of information on how interwiki links used to be generated prior to 2013, but there is almost nothing about how to do it now.

The only info I found is "Pages with their interlanguage links on Wikidata display an "Edit links" button under the language list." Can somebody give me advice how to add an interlanguage link if there is still no language list? For example Czech Wikipedia has the Edit link button even if the list is still empty, but here the button appears only if there have been some languages listed before. Thanks. Jan.Kamenicek (talk) 06:29, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Recently I have the same problem. Now I just add them the old way and wait for a bot to fix it. Agathoclea (talk) 11:13, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

the archive of this talk page is faulty ?
Hej,

Could someone please fix the archive of this talkpage, if feasible ? Currently it does not show the archive's table of content, but the version history or sth. like that. Searching the archive results in http-timeout for me.

I am sure my doubt resp. misunderstanding has been discussed before, so would want to avoid re-discussion/-asking. thanks. Pardon my German (Fiiiisch!) (talk) 18:31, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * It is an odd-looking page, but I don't think it is faulty. It is a correct copy of the material that was removed from the talk page in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:Interwiki_linking&diff=193913247&oldid=175592570 this edit in 2008]. It is a listing of the editors who contributed to the page from which Help:Interwiki linking was copied; that gives them appropriate credit. See "Copying within Wikipedia" for more.
 * The software doesn't show a table of contents because, as yet, there are only two headings there. By default, the software only displays a table of contents when there are four headings.
 * I don't know why your search is timing out. You could try adjusting your preferences here to try out a newer search engine. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:12, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

"Interlanguage link" section copied notice
This page used to have a long section titled "Interlanguage links". In 2010 it was moved to Help:Interlanguage links. I have added a Copied template to this Talk page to save a record of the move. Now I am going to delete most of that material from the move destination, because it is outdated. But before doing that I added this notice to keep the history straight, as the old material was created here. – Margin1522 (talk) 11:32, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

The new interwiki display on en:wikipedia is NOT helpful
Hi, does anybody here have to do something with the new sorting of the language (interwiki) sidebar? Probably whoever did it is very proud of it. But it is NOT helpful. It takes longer to look for a language. If the do that on Ripoarisch, fine. But unfortunately en:wikipedia is something like a reference for other versions. Thus it should not be more complicated.

I work on sw and often refer to other versions when starting a new entry. This takes more time now. The system sometimes gives random results and you have to guess to which continent the bias of the programmer put alanguage. Today I saw Nederlands under "America". Simple I often find under "Worldwide", but also saw it NOT there but under "Europe". Surely there is a reason why Kurdish is very prominently under "common", but I have stopped asking myself why. Please: do NOT try to correct this BUT simply list ALL languages by a-b-c.Kipala (talk) 08:07, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't see interwiki links with random results nor do I understand what you mean by "programmer's bias". Under which circumstances does "Nederlands" appear "under 'America'"? Where do sections named "Worldwide", "Europe", "common" appear? Here, using the Monobook skin, I don't see those. On the other hand, you can opt to display interwiki links in English by ticking the SidebarTranslate box at Preferences Gadgets. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:12, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Michael is there a way to send you some screenshots? It is strange that I see things that you cannot see. Today I have again Nederlands in America, lojban and Novial under "Worldwide", Deutsch, Kurdi and Armenian under "Common languages", Hindi and some Southern Indian under "Middle East". If someone put it there, I would call it an "editors bias" (= personal geography). If nobody put it there, we probably have a a very independent logarithm reacting differently to whatsoever impulse it receives on its way thru the net. But it definitely is NOT helpful, - are you one of the guys who can switch it off? - And thanks for hint to gadgets - but this does not change the sorting, right? Kipala (talk) 07:07, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Just uploaded my screenshots. I don't get anymore an alphabetical list of all languages, just a few sorted a-b-c, and then a field ("123" more), clicking here I get the window "Language search" covering part of the screen and sorting languages by areas)




 * Fun aside: Why can you not see that???? Is that a meta- or mediawiki gimmick they just imposed on the smaller wikipedias, but not on English? This is theonly version where it occurs.

Cheers! Kipala (talk) 07:42, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I've never seen screens like the ones you show above. After some digging, I concluded that they must have something to do with "Input methods" and Universal Language Selector, which are completely unknown to me. You may get more competent advice at WP:Village pump (technical). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:13, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The short answer is that you somehow enabled the beta feature called "Compact Language Links", and if you don't like it, you can disable it.
 * The longer answer is that the languages that appear in Common and in different continents are based on your usage of the site and on statistics from the CLDR repository. Surprising as it may sound, Yiddish and Dutch are indeed spoken by a non-negligible number of people in the American continent (for examples see Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Kiryas Joel, New York, Suriname and Aruba). I can't know exactly why do you see Kurdish in Common Languages because it is different for every user, but you either selected this language at some point, or you are connecting to the Internet from a country where a non-negligible number of people speak it, or your browser is configured to request pages in it.
 * The compact language links feature is supposed to show the languages that in which the reader is most likely to be interested by default. This guessing still needs to be tweaked, which is one of the reasons it's still beta. I hope to take it out of beta some time in 2015, but there are no solid plans or dates for it yet. The possibility of showing the whole list alphabetically will be kept if and when it becomes non-beta. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 13:25, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info! Ok for me that type of display is not desirable. How do I get out of it? Where do I find the beta feature called "Compact Language Links" ? Kipala (talk) 13:32, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Have a look at Special:Preferences. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:39, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you!! Saved my day!! Kipala (talk) 17:55, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Problem with Korean/English article link
Could somebody drop in at Talk:Sambe? Thanks in advance ☆ Bri (talk) 02:44, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I think that Help:Interwikimedia links should be merged into this article, Help:Interwiki linking. The two articles cover the same topic, and this article appears to have all information that the other one has.

By the way, maybe we should have Help:Linking to sister projects redirect to the merge article?

Please discuss the proposed merge here and not on Help talk:Interwikimedia links or anywhere else. Care to differ or discuss with me? The Nth User 02:21, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Support I see no reason for having two pages.PBS (talk) 10:00, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Support Yes please! Darn fragmentation. From looking at a couple of random 2006 era diffs, it seems that Help:Interwikimedia_links was originally a simpler/basic overview, and Help:Interwiki_linking was always the more complex version. The former's intent should just be the top section of a single page. Thank you for doing this! Quiddity (talk) 00:33, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes. Seems to be a pointless WP:ADVICEFORK.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:19, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Support. Daask (talk) 13:06, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Non-roman scripts
Hi, ; re this revert, I think it doesn't work, because an English-wikipedia article will not have a name given in an completely non-Roman script. Therefore the redlink will be wrong; it will be for an article that will never be created, and will thus never turn blue. Example: حليمة مظفر. This gives a non-arabic-speaker no clue what the English article should be called, and even an arabic-speaking editor would need to go look up our romanization standards to know. Maybe we need another parameter for the English-article title, if different from the foreign-language title. HLHJ (talk) 20:08, 23 December 2019 (UTC)
 * The ill template has options that cover this: Halima Muzaffar. I don't think this help page should try to explain all that the template can do, provided it has a link to the template. Disclaimer: "Halima Muzaffar" is from Google Translate; I know no Arabic. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:06, 23 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Aside: ill also provides options to link to Wikidata (Halema Muzaffar) and Commons (Halema Muzaffar). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:31, 24 December 2019 (UTC)
 * That's great, that's the functionality I wanted and did not find. Any clarification that would make subsequent editors more likely to figure it out is good, but obviously not everything can go everywhere. HLHJ (talk) 17:23, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Invalid syntax
Hey, I tried James Bond and de:w:James Bond with the first being a red link, and the 2nd one linking to English wiki page despite looking like a valid German interwiki link. Am I misunderstanding your edits? Shushugah (talk) 16:17, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry about that. -- PK2 (talk) 23:19, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
 * The redlink on the first is easily explained: the  part is not being parsed as an interwiki prefix, but as a namespace prefix, and there is no page named   in the Wikipedia: namespace. The fix for this is to shorten   to , as in James Bond.
 * The fact that the second one is apparently ignoring the  part is a puzzler. When I hover over the link, or examine the HTML for the page, the link is https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/w:James_Bond but upon clicking it, the page that is reached has the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond - I think that the behaviour for this one has indeed changed. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:51, 28 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm having a similar issue with the syntax. I'm trying to use  to link from wikt:Wiktionary:Reference_templates to Wikipedia. It doesn't work there, but it works here: Íslensk orðsifjabók. Does anyone know what's going on? Caoimhin ceallach (talk) 14:48, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Adding and changing interwiki prefixes
What rights do a user need to have to add/change/delete the interwiki prefixes? I would like a halopedia: prefix to link to Halopedia, a Halo fan site (https://www.halopedia.org/$1), youtubechannel: to link to a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/$1), and youtubevideo: to link to a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1). EthanGaming7640 (talk) 16:46, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

iarchive interwiki links
Hi, I recently had a student create an interwiki-like link from the section on Wife No. 19 on the Ann Eliza Young page to a scan of the book on Internet Archive. As I'm researching the iarchive interwiki link, it looks like it was made to make it easier to link to sources on Wikisource. Is it appropriate to use in the body of a Wikipedia page? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 20:40, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Interwiki links to IMDB
Following a discussion at Help_desk/Archives/2022_February_9 and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Film/Archive_79 and I have removed all instances to date where interwiki links such as Zengo have been used in Mainspace. The searches for imdbname and imdbtitle  therefore currently contain no hits. Unfortunately, the documentation on this Help Page implies that such interwiki links are acceptable in the body text of articles, disagreeing with WP:ELPOINTS and leading to WP:EASTEREGGs as when clicked they take readers out of Wikipedia despite looking to most like conventional bluelinks. Note that there are templates imdbname and imdbtitle that achieve the same outcome and are widely used in the external links section of articles. Please can an expert alter this Help documentation to make it less likely editors will use these links incorrectly? Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:17, 14 May 2022 (UTC)


 * I haven't checked the documentation but I support this message. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:38, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Interlanguage links not deprecated
The wording should be changed to say that Interlanguage links are deprecated in mainspace, not that they are deprecated everywhere.

Section marks interlanguage links as deprecated, full stop, but they have a good use which should encouraged, not discouraged, and that is for translators who start their translated articles in Draft space. I have created dozens of articles this way, and it is a huge timesaver to have the manual interlanguage link point to the original (foreign) language Wikipedia article, which makes it show up in the left sidebar/language dropdown list, from where you can quickly find the original. There is evidence of usage of it in the first three languages I tried: de, fr, es, and so on. (Some of these are clearly malformed interwiki links which failed to include the leading colon, maybe even most of them; but not all are.)

There is nothing wrong with this usage, and the guideline should not discourage it. Mathglot (talk) 02:42, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree. Old-style interlanguage links are generally not needed any more, but, as WP:LOCALLINK points out, there are situations where they still serve a purpose, even in mainspace. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:40, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Special period advertising sister projects
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Special period advertising sister projects. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 21:19, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Linking Commons
It appears that this guideline is outdated: Commons is linked automatically and shown on the sidebar of the articlr, if it is in wikidata. I am not sure whether the same is valid for other sister projects like wikiquote. - Altenmann >talk 20:32, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Which specific part is outdated? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:12, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry I was not clear: the section about linking to sister project must say that Commons and possibly other sister projects are linked automatically and adding templates like {commonscat} is no longer necessary. Instead, people must update wikidata. I am raising the issue because recently I see a flurry of wikignomes adding unnecesary {commonscat} template into articles on my watchlist. - Altenmann >talk 00:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Most of the page is about making links such as, not about  and similar boxes. There are also times when Wikidata is incapable of producing an appropriate link, see for example the two  at AEC Renown. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:48, 2 June 2024 (UTC)