Help:Link
If you're trying to ask for help from someone named Link, check out the Legend of Zelda RPG.
Links are used to direct readers to other pages. They're an important part of what makes wikis (and websites in general) useful.
Internal links[edit]
Internal links (or "wikilinks") lead to other pages in this wiki. Most of the links are going to be of this variety. They are formed by enclosing the link text in double square brackets:
- [[Help:Editing]] makes a link to the page titled Help:Editing. We could use lowercase "h", because the first letter of a link is case-insensitive (as are all letters in a namespace -- e.g. Story:Love Can Bloom and sToRy:Love Can Bloom both go to the same place -- see Help:Namespaces for a list of namespaces), but the others are case-sensitive.
The "pipe" character ("|") and text immediately abutting the brackets can be used to modify the appearance of a link:
- Any text after the pipe gets displayed, while the link goes to the article title that comes before the pipe, e.g. [[Baneblade|BEEEEEIIIINBLAAAAADE]] looks like BEEEEEIIIINBLAAAAADE but links to the "Baneblade" article. For more information on using piped links, see Piped links.
- [[Troll]]s becomes Trolls (this is one of the reasons that article titles should generally be singular -- it's easy to put a link to that page from a plural word), BUT:
- [[Troll]]'s becomes Troll's -- in fact, most (if not all) punctuation (including repeated single-quotes used for italics and/or bolding) and capital letters "interrupts" the link, so that whatever comes after does not become part of the link. If you want the "'s" or multiple words to be part of the link, you will have to use the pipe, e.g. [[Troll|Troll's]] or [[Kaldor Draigo|GW's Mary Sue]].
- Super[[troll]] becomes Supertroll -- the spacing (or lack thereof) is preserved, but the first part of the word does not become a link (not sure why you would do this, but if you want to, you can).
- These all "stack", so Super[[Baneblade|BEEEEEIIIINBLAAAAADE]]master looks like SuperBEEEEEIIIINBLAAAAADEmaster.
It is better to use internal links wherever possible; not only does adding external links require you to solve a CAPTCHA, but the wiki software can't keep track of their destinations, and so will list pages as being under-connected when they really aren't (which can in turn lead to problems with maintenance, if we don't realize that a page has anything linking to it because that page is only linked to by external links).
Subpages[edit]
Pages in namespaces which have subpages enabled (Campaign, Quest, Setting, Story, /TG/heim, User, and all of the Talk namespaces -- see Help:Namespace for more details) can have subpages (e.g. Setting:Tiji Sector has Setting:Tiji Sector/Planets), with successive layers defined by using the slash character ("/"). A page can link to its own subpages and parent page without needing the cumbersome prefixes:
- Setting:Tiji Sector could link to Setting:Tiji Sector/Planets by linking to "/Planets"
- Setting:Tiji Sector/Planets could link to Setting:Tiji Sector by linking to "../"
Subpages and parent pages (and grandparent pages, and "uncle" and "cousin" pages, and so on) can be linked to each other very easily this way.
Be careful if you're linking to a page whose title starts with a slash (e.g. "/tg/" and other 4chan boards) from a page in a subpage-enabled namespace -- if we were to place [[/tg/]] on Setting:Tiji Sector, it would attempt to link to the nonexistent "Setting:Tiji Sector/tg". To force a link to go to the page with the exact title you type (and this also goes for linking to categories or transcluding non-template pages -- see Help:Template and Help:Category for more information), put a colon at the beginning (i.e. [[:/tg/]]).
If you want a page to show a list of all of its subpages (e.g. a Story: with its chapters stored as subpages), you can insert the <subpages /> or <splist /> tags, or the {{#subpages: }} or {{#splist: }} parser functions on the page to produce such a list. See the SubPageList extension manual for more information.
Section links[edit]
If you want to link to a section of a page, you can link to it with [[#Section Name]] from within the page, or by [[Page Name#Section Name]] from another page. This works over redirects as well -- e.g. a link to Space Marine#History will lead to the "History" section even though "Space Marine" redirects to "Space Marines".
If you need to link to a part of a page that does not have a section header, or change the name of a section without breaking other pages' links leading to that section, you can use {{Anchor}} at the place on the target page you want to link to, and then treat it just like a section name as described here.
Piped links[edit]
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 [[Malcador Heavy Tank|Malcador]] 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. [[Foo:Bar|]] 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. [[Malcador (tank)|]] 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 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 redirects instead of piped links, but in some situations (especially ambiguous titles, as in the "Malcador" example) redirects are not appropriate.
Interwiki links[edit]
If you want to link to a Wikipedia page, you can do so using the internal link syntax if you put "wikipedia:" in front of the page name:
- [[wikipedia:Help:Link]] will lead to the Help:Link page on Wikipedia. You could do this with an external link instead (see below), but making new external links forces you to take a Captcha test, which is annoying.
External links[edit]
Links to non-1d4chan web pages (or 1d4chan web pages that cannot be reached through internal links, like history pages and previous revisions) can be left bare (if they start with http:// or https://), in which case the whole address will be spelled out and made into a hyperlink. If you want to give it a different label, you can enclose the link in brackets, and put the title following a space (e.g. [https://www.games-workshop.com/ Games Workshop's home page]), or enclose the title in brackets to make it show up as a bracketed number (rather than leaving a clumsy, long URL hanging around).
Using links[edit]
In general, the first time a name (of a character, army, vehicle, or whatever) gets used in an article, it should link to that entity's page (though section headers should not include links, for the purposes of accessibility and consistency of formatting), especially if it's relevant to the topic of the article. Feel free to link to that term if it occurs later in the page, but don't overdo it. Links should be specific and make sense in context. Using piped links or redirects is acceptable if the linked article's title does not fit exactly in the linking article's text, but links should not "surprise" the reader.
For example, if we are beginning the Imperial Fists article with "The Imperial Fists are a Space Marine Chapter," it is reasonable to want to link to both Space Marines (which the Imperial Fists are) and Space Marine Chapter (to explain the structure of the Chapter), but if we were to accomplish this by linking "Space Marine" to "Space Marines" and "Chapter" to "Space Marine Chapter", that would look like this: "The Imperial Fists are a Space Marine Chapter." Notice that the words "Space Marine Chapter" are all adjacent and all linked, which makes it seem like all three words are part of the same link. A user would be surprised to find that, in fact, the first two words are part of one link and the third word links somewhere else. It would be better to write this as "The Imperial Fists are a Chapter of Space Marines," where the two links are clearly separated.
Other "surprising" uses of links include long sentences with adjacent words or word pairs linked to different pages and "easter egg" links (e.g. [[FATAL|The worst role-playing game of all time]]). While these may be entertaining in moderation to some, they quickly become difficult to read and more frustrating than useful.
Checking links[edit]
Make sure to use the "Show preview" button (between "Save page" and "Show changes" at the bottom of the page) to check that all of your internal links resolve. If you see any redlinks, either the article does not exist (if you think the article should exist, leave the link where it is and it may get created) or the article name has been misspelled. This can be the result of mixing up the case (e.g. "Space marine" is different from "Space Marine"), plural/singular (articles should generally have singular titles, categories should generally be plural -- if you need to spell out a term in plural while the article title is singular, use a piped link or tack on the -s or -es as in the "Troll(s)" example above), or a typo.