Help:Interwiki linking

Interwiki links are links to pages of other projects, using a prefixed internal link style.

Interwiki links make it possible, to link to pages of (e.g.) Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews etc. or to your wiki-project in different languages (see Manual:Wiki family).

A link like [[Wikipedia:Main Page]] will appear like this: Wikipedia:Main Page and redirect you to Wikipedia's Main Page.

For setting up interwiki links, you might need to edit the Database.

Interwiki links to other projects

Default

Several Wikimedia-Projects (and others) are ready for interwiki linking by default, so you can use them without editing your database. However, the mother of all Wikimedia-projects — the Wikipedia itself — is for some reason missing.

prefix	direction	usage example
commons	http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/	[[commons:MediaWiki]]
mediazilla	http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/	[[mediazilla:1209]]
meta	http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/	[[meta:Main Page]]
mw	http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/	[[mw:Help:Contents]]
wikibooks	http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/	[[wikibooks:Main Page]]
wikimedia	http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/	[[wikimedia:Main Page]]
wikinews	http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/	[[wikinews:Main Page]]
wikiquote	http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/	[[wikiquote:Main Page]]
wikisource	http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/	[[wikisource:Main Page]]
wikispecies	http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/	[[wikispecies:Main Page]]
wiktionary	http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/	[[wiktionary:Main Page]]

Adding more

As the Wikipedia isn't set up by default, you might want to add it (and other projects of your need).

You have to edit your own database. Go to table interwiki and add a new line:

• iw_prefix: choose a prefix, which is used for interwiki linking, e.g. "Wikipedia" or "wp" for linking to Wikipedia
• iw_url: enter the project's URL, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1 for Wikipedia. Don't forget the $1 as it is replaced with the article's name you are linking to ([[Wikipedia:Main Page]] links to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page).
• iw_local: if 1, your wiki will redirect even external links of the form iw_prefix:title, not only those from its own pages. you need this if you want to use the redirect functionality from outside your wiki or other wikis use your transwiki functions for nested transwiki links (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Accueil)
• iw_trans: "transwiki transclusion" - set to 1 if you want to use pages from the other wiki as templates. You will also need to set $wgEnableScaryTranscluding = true in your LocalSettings.php