Editing Help:Link (section)

=== Piped links ===

Piped links contain a "pipe" character ("|") splitting them in half.  This allows a link's target (i.e. the article to which the link leads) and label (i.e. the text in the article that contains the link) to be different, which allows a link to be used even if the exact target name doesn't fit in the context of an article without requiring a clumsy "See also:" construction.  For example, in an article about vehicles used by the Imperial Guard, it is much more likely that the word "Malcador" refers to the [[Malcador Heavy Tank]] rather than the character [[Malcador the Sigillite]] (for whom the tank is named), but it's clumsy to spell out "Malcador Heavy Tank" every time we want to link to that page, so we can type <nowiki>[[Malcador Heavy Tank|Malcador]]</nowiki> to "fit" a link to the article about the tank while only using the short form of its name.

If we leave the text to the right of the pipe blank, the wiki software performs some automatic abbreviation on the link target and makes that the link label.  The rules for the so-called "pipe trick" are as follows:
# If the link target contains a colon (and does not simply ''start with'' a colon), then the first colon inside the target and everything before it are removed.  E.g. <nowiki>[[Foo:Bar|]]</nowiki> will look like "Bar".
# If the link target ends with something contained in parentheses, the parentheses and the text they contain will be removed.  This is useful if the link target has disambiguation information after it, e.g. <nowiki>[[Malcador (tank)|]]</nowiki> will be rendered as "Malcador" without having to type out the name a second time and risk making a typo.
# If the link target has no parentheses but has a comma, the first comma and everything after it is removed.
# The pipe trick is applied before [[Help:Template|templates]] and other substitutions are performed, so be careful if you're using it as part of a larger operation.

In many circumstances, we can use [[Help:Redirect|redirects]] instead of piped links, but in some situations (especially ambiguous titles, as in the "Malcador" example) redirects are not appropriate.