Help:Interlanguage links

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Interlanguage links sometimes called interwiki links, are links from any page (most notably articles) in one Wikipedia language to one or more nearly equivalent or exactly equivalent pages in another Wikipedia language, between language versions of Wiktionary, and the same within Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks.

The interlanguage links on Commons produce links to the Wikipedias. This is not reciprocal: Wikipedias do not support interlanguage links to Commons, but often use templates like {{Commons}} and {{Commons category}}.

Interlanguage links are a form of interwiki links.

Contents

Syntax [edit]

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 Commons Gallery Plankton has the interlanguage links which might look like this:

[[ar:عوالق]]
[[de:Plankton]]
[[en:Plankton]]
[[eo:Planktono]]
[[es:Plancton]]
[[fr:Plancton]]
[[nl:Plankton]]
[[ja:プランクトン]]
[[ko:플랑크톤]]
[[pl:Plankton]]
[[ru:Планктон]]
[[simple:Plankton]]
[[zh:浮游生物界]]

NOTE: These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special sidebar section "in Wikipedia" listed by language name. Technically they can go anywhere in the article source; placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page except for the order. However, the convention is to put them at the bottom of the wikitext.

Namespaces [edit]

Interlanguage links can be added to pages in almost any namespace and in general should point to pages in the same namespace in the Wikipedias. The major exception is category namespace on Commons which often have Interlanguage links to Wikipedia articles. Fore more info see table below.

Commons namespaces Link to Wikipedia namespace
0 Gallery Article
Talk All talk pages should not be linked
2 User User
4 Commons Wikipedia
6 File No links
8 MediaWiki No links
10 Template Template
12 Help Help
14 Category Category
Article
100 Creator No links
102 TimedText No links
104 Sequence No links
106 Institution No links

NOTE: since 2013, Wikipedia projects are transforming and moving their interwiki links to Wikidata. This format is not compatible with Commons yet. The new format thwarted to move interwiki block from Wikipedia to Commons. Please use an interwiki link to at least one article or category of Wikipedia to tie the Commons category with the item at Wikipedias.

Bot Maintenance [edit]

Various bots, many based on Pywikipediabot interwiki.py code, add and attempt to correct interlanguage links: if Commons links to A and A to B, than bot will add link to C. The downside is that an error in an interlanguage link in one Wikipedia propagates to other Wikipedias. Thus if a bot produces a wrong result one may have to search for the underlying error in another language version of Wikipedia.

If interwiki bots persistently add an interwiki link that human editors consider wrong, it is no use revert-warring against the bots: they won't understand and will always add the link back in. A simple solution is not to remove the offending link, but to enclose it in html comment marks ("<!-- [[ex:Example]] -->"). The bots understand this convention and will not re-add a link marked in this way.

See also [edit]

External links [edit]

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