The
pipe trick uses the
pipe character ("") to save typing the label of a
piped link for several kinds of
wiki links. This can avoid potentially making an error while typing the label.
When the last character of a link is the pipe character, the pipe trick will automatically generate the text that displays for that link. It removes the parenthesized part of the link title, but it also processes commas in the title, and prefixes. The generated text is saved with the rest of the page's wiki markup.
The pipe trick doesn't work in edit summaries, within <ref> tags, or links to sections – see below.
Examples
|
| Article titles
| style="width: 33%; vertical-align: top" | Pages in other namespaces
|
Combinations
The basic rule when the pipe trick is used is that an (initial) prefix, a final part beginning with a comma, or a final parenthesis (usually intended for disambiguation) is suppressed in the rendering of the link. The rendered text is case neutral and so should be entered precisely as the user wishes it to appear in the article. In case of combinations of suppressible parts, the following rules apply:
Where it doesn't work
Where the pipe trick doesn't work, the link must be written out in full manually.
<ref> footnotes and <gallery> tags
The trick does not work when enclosing between
"ref" tags or .
renders in the references list (generated by the [[Pipe (computing)|]] tag) as:
Edit summaries
The trick does not work in edit summaries.
renders in the edit history as:
Section links
The pipe trick does not work on
section links, and in general it does not work for links to anchors (links that use a sign). For example,
does not give you any wikilink. See , "[[Boston, Massachusetts|]]".
Related tricks
Slash trick
You can achieve a similar effect for
subpage by adding a slash.
generates:
- /Subpage/
Unlike the pipe trick, though, the slash trick is not expanded in the saved wiki markup.
This trick only works in namespaces where subpages are enabled.
Reverse pipe trick
If the title of the article you are editing includes a parenthesized term or a comma, placing a pipe at the
start of a link will append that parenthesized text to the link target, but not display it.
For example, if the link
were placed in
Agonist, the link would be expanded to
Placing a pipe at the start of a link to an article that has no parentheses or comma in its title will have no effect.
Alternatives
Some templates are available as alternatives to using the trick for linking.
(shortcut: )
See also
