Wikipedia:Tip of the day/July 30, 2008

Create links faster

1. Pipe trick: Many article titles are disambiguated with parenthetic qualifiers, like this: Self (psychology). But when you want to include such a link in the body of an article, this would look rather awkward. So all you have to do is use the "pipe trick", like this: Self (psychology). Notice the "|" character stuck in there at the end of the link? That makes the link look like this: Self, without having to type the name of the link after the pipe! This trick also works with namespaces, so that Tip of the day (again notice the pipe character) displays like this: Tip of the day. (On the other hand, writing , with a space after the "|" character, creates an invisible link, affecting "what links here" and "related changes".)

2. Plural trick: Often, you'll be editing an article and need to make a link to a plural. For example, suppose you wanted to link "Fred Foo was famous for his study of puddles" to puddle, you could link it like so: puddles. However, you can save time instead by writing puddles. This also works for adjectives ( Japanese ), verbs ( danced ) and any other suffixes. It does not, however, work for irregular verbs ( tryied does not work; you have to do tried ), nor for apostrophes and hyphens ( John-Paul, J. R. R. Tolkien's ).

Read more: Wikipedia:Links and URLs

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