Wikipedia:Tutorial (External links)
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Wiki Markup examples
Welcome to the Wikipedia Tutorial. This is intended for users who have already learned about Wikipedia through the Introduction and are ready to get started. After reading this series of pages you will gain the basic skills and knowledge you'll need as you become a Wikipedian. For a hands-on tutorial, you can also attend one of our Wikipedia Bootcamps.
Each page will discuss a useful feature of the wiki software, a piece of style and content guidance, information about the Wikipedia community, or important Wikipedia policies and conventions.
Keep in mind that this is a tutorial, not a definitive policy page or an extensive manual. If you want more details, throughout the tutorial there are wiki links to other Wikipedia pages. Those pages have more information on the topics here. If you want to read them as you go along, you might want to open them in a separate window.
There will be links to "sandbox" pages where you can practice what you're learning. Try things out and play around. Nobody will get upset if you mess up an experiment in these practice areas, so play around and see what you can do.
Note: This Tutorial assumes you are using the default page layout. If you are logged in and have changed your preferences, the location of links on the screen may be different.
Ready? OK, let's begin!
| This article is part of the Wikipedia Tutorial |
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Front page |
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Wiki-syntax makes it easy to make user-friendly external links.
External links
If you want to link to a site outside of Wikipedia, it should almost always go under the "External links" heading at the end of an article.
The easiest way to make a link is to simply type in the full URL for the page you want to link to. If you want to make a link to Google, all you need to do is type:
The wiki will automatically treat this text as a link (as has been done with the URL above) and will display the raw web address, including the "http://" part. In practice, you won't see this format much, as raw URLs are ugly and often give no clue to what the site actually is.
To make the link display something other than the URL, use one square bracket at each end. If you want to make a link to Google, type:
- [http://www.google.com/]
This will display the link as a number in brackets, like this: [1]. This format is mostly used for citing sources within an article. It looks like a footnote, so it's best to use it only as such (for example, following a direct quote or a statement which requires a source). Avoid this usage: "According to [2], the last full moon of the second millennium occurred on December 11, 1999." Rather do this: "the last full moon of the second millennium occurred on December 11, 1999.[3]" Also avoid using an external link when it's possible to accomplish the same thing with an internal link to a Wikipedia article.
If you want the link to appear with text that you specify, add an alternative title after the address separated by a space (not a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as Google search engine, just type:
- [http://www.google.com/ Google search engine]
Note: Using certain characters, such as a pipe (|) in the URL of the link will cause the link to fail; however, URL syntax provides the ability to specify any character in a URL as a hexadecimal equivalent to its ASCII representation, so you can, for instance, write %7C instead of the pipe character. See our table of ASCII printable characters for more hexadecimal codes.
When placed under the "External links" heading, the links should be listed in bullet-point format:
- ==External links==
- *[http://www.google.com/ Google search engine]
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