Wikipedia:Tip of the day/March 19, 2008

Link tricks

Here are two tricks to reduce the amount of typing needed to create links:

1. The pipe trick: A pipe (|) at the end of the link to a page will hide disambiguations (the part of a page name in parentheses) and namespace prefixes ("Talk:", "Wikipedia:" etc.) from the visible link. For example: [ [Lord of the Rings (movie)|]] becomes [  [Lord of the Rings (movie)|Lord of the Rings]], which is shown as Lord of the Rings (the part in parentheses is hidden). And now a namespace example: [ [Wikipedia:About|]] is converted to [  [Wikipedia:About|About]], which is shown as About.

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 or prefixes. However, it does not work for some irregular verbs. ( Tryied does not work; you have to use tried ).

Read more: Wikipedia:Links and URLs

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