Interlanguage links are links from a page in one Wikipedia language to an equivalent page in another language. These links can appear in two places. 1. A list of languages that a page is available in is shown in a special section on the page (by default, the list is shown on the left of a page under "Languages"). And 2. links can be placed inline in the text of a page. These two types of links are created and handled differently and are discussed in different sections below.
The list of links
Pages on Wikipedia can have a list of equivalent pages in other languages. For example, the Irish Wikipedia has a page on Ireland titled "Éire", so the English Wikipedia article on Ireland will link to the Irish one, and vise-versa. For most people this list is shown on the left of the page, but this can be changed by changing the skin the site uses. This list is maintained in two places, Wikidata and the text of the page itself.
Wikidata
Wikidata is a separate project to create a collaboratively edited knowledge base. Part of this project is to centralize the interlanguage links for all the Wikipedia projects. The Wikidata entry for a page contains (among other things) a list of links for that entry in different languages. This list of links is then used for the list shown on the page in Wikipedia. You can get to the Wikidata entry for a page by clicking on Edit Links at the bottom of languages list.
Adding a new link
At the bottom of the Wikidata language list is an add link. Clicking on this will reveal two text boxes, one for the language and another for the article title. In the first box type in the language code, for example, for Irish use the code "ga". In the second box, type the name of the article as it appears in that language's Wikipedia. Then click save.
Editing a link
To edit an entry on Wikidata, click on the edit link next to the entry you wish to edit. A textbox will appear allowing you to edit the entry. Click on save when you are done.
Removing a link
You can remove a page from the list of Wikidata's links. To do so click edit, then click on the remove link.
Local Links
Before Wikidata, Interlanguage links had to be recorded in the text of the page itself. The problem with this approach was that each language had to maintain its own separate lists. So for example, if the name of a page on the English Wikipedia changed, then each language that linked to that page would have to separately notice this fact and then change their own links.
For most pages, these links are no longer needed and can be safely removed, however you should verify that the local list and the Wikidata lists match before doing so.
The local links do however still serve a purpose as they override the information that comes from Wikidata.
Syntax
The local interlanguage
links take the following form:
[[language code:Title]]
where the language code is the two-letter code as per ISO 639-1. (See . English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the English language article on Plankton, which is available on many other wikis, the interlanguage links might look like this:
[[ar:عوالق]]
[[el:Πλαγκτόν]]
[[fa:پلانکتون]]
[[he:פלנקטון]]
[[ja:プランクトン]]
[[ko:플랑크톤]]
[[ru:Планктон]]
[[ta:மிதவைவாழி]]
[[te:ప్లవకాలు]]
[[th:แพลงก์ตอน]]
[[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 "" listed by language name. They can go anywhere in the article source as their 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 page. Remember, you only need these type links if you are overriding the information from Wikidata, otherwise you should edit the links on the Wikidata entry.
Featured articles and good articles
Wikidata does not currently have a way to represent featured or good articles, so links to featured and good articles in other languages will have to be maintained on the page itself. To mark one or more of these links as a
featured article or
good article in a specific language, add the or below:
{{Link FA|language code}} {{Link GA|language code}}
For example, if the Tomato article is a featured one in French and a good one in German, you should write:
{{Link FA|fr}} {{Link GA|de}}
Inline links
Purpose
Ordinary interlanguage links are used primarily to link an existing English Wikipedia page to a
corresponding page in another language Wikipedia. If it is desired to include, in some article, a link to a topic that is not covered by an article on the English Wikipedia but which does have a page in another language version of Wikipedia, then there are two possible approaches:
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Use a pointing to a possible future article on the English Wikipedia;
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Use an interlanguage link pointing to the existing article on the other Wikipedia, as described in the next section.
The advantage of the first approach is that the red link informs all readers that the page does not exist locally, thus inviting its creation, and avoiding directing readers to a page that many of them will not understand. The disadvantage is that it conceals the existence of the foreign-language page, which might in itself be of interest to many readers, and may also be valuable to anyone wishing to create a corresponding English Wikipedia article.
It is sometimes possible to combine the two approaches, giving a local red link in addition to an interlanguage link explicitly marked as such. For example: "...the plans were drawn up by German architect Hans Knoblauch (de)..." The templates and are designed to assist this combined approach.
If a red link is not appropriate locally for whatever reason, such as because the subject does not appear to be , then linking to the other language page may be useful.
Interlanguage links may also be useful outside of the for convenience, such as from one's userpage to a page frequently visited or that like-minded visitors might want to go to.
Method
You can create a clickable link that will be visible in the text by adding a colon before the language abbreviation:
- <nowiki></nowiki>
You can use the pipe to show only the title:
- <nowiki></nowiki>
Which would look like this: Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle or 井戸端 in your text.
Thus you would use <nowiki></nowiki> (or use the pipe trick to simplify this to: <nowiki></nowiki>) to link to "Wikilink" on Japanese Wikipedia. (Example: <nowiki></nowiki> links to URL on Japanese Wikipedia).
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Interlanguage links in Talk pages and on Meta will appear inline in the text, like regular links, so you can cite other pages in discussion.
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In normal articles, an inline link can be made by prefixing an extra colon as explained above, which is the method that should be used for linking to an article in another language which is not the corresponding article.
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An inline link to a Wiktionary entry, normally [[:fr:Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle]] or [[:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端]], can be directed to another language's Wiktionary like so: [[:fr:Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle|Littérature française du XVIIIe siècle]] or [[:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端|Wikipedia:井戸端]].
Links to pages that do not exist
Links to pages on another wiki (including other
Wikimedia Foundation sites) are coloured differently from links within the English Wikipedia. Unlike internal links, these links do not indicate whether the target page exists or not. If the target page does not exist, the link leads to the empty page, with a message informing you about this.
If you find blank interlanguage links on the English Wikipedia, they may be deleted as having no content or you can comment them out. It is strongly recommended that you create at least a stub page before adding interlanguage links to it. Later, interested people can translate the rest of the page content from the original language to the new one for which the link was made.
Note: if the language prefix is wrong it is considered part of the name of a page on the same wiki. Such an error is clear from how the link looks: as an internal link to a page that does or does not exist.
Sorting
The link tags should be sorted alphabetically based on the local names of the languages, as described at . The vast majority of articles are currently sorted this way. Sorting alphabetically according to the two-letter language abbreviations is also acceptable. There are numerous other sorting methods to sort interlanguage links, but consistency between articles is encouraged.
Other
- For a complete list of current languages and language codes, see:
For a multilingual family of similar projects, with one project per language, a system for interlanguage linking can be set up, setting to true and to false. If this project is in a family for which this applies, Interlanguage link demo may demonstrate what is explained below (this depends on whether the same language codes are used).
An interwiki link within the family is treated differently, unless it is on a talk page of any namespace. It appears at one or two edges of the webpage (left in Monobook, top and bottom in Classic).
Thus, an interlanguage link is mainly suitable for linking to the most closely corresponding page in another language. It is not suitable for multiple links of the same other language. See for a discussion of common troubles with this system and other possible implementations.
The feature can also be used on an image description page, to link to the same or a similar image in a sister project. Other interwiki links to images require the prefixed colon.
Note that, if a page may be used as a template (even if it is not in the template namespace), it should note its interlanguage links between <noinclude> and </noinclude>. This is the same idea as for categories.
Comparison:
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[[:en:link]] or [[:category:name]] are ordinary links.
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[[m:en:link]] or [[m:category:name]] are interwiki links, see above.
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[[category:name]] without leading colon, adds a category to the page.
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[[en:link]] without leading colon, adds an interlanguage link to the page.
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<noinclude>[[category:name]]</noinclude> limits it to the actual page.
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<noinclude>[[en:link]]</noinclude> also limits it to the actual page.
For projects like , a missing leading colon has no effect, because Meta doesn't support interlanguage links. For and similar projects, it is a major difference. The mutual order of interlanguage links is preserved, but otherwise the positions within the wikitext are immaterial, again the same rule as for categories. Usually they are put at the end. With section editing, they appear in the preview, if they are in the section being edited. A link to the project itself (hence, also a link to the page itself), even if referred to with the project prefix, appears in-page.
Suppose that we have pages Zug, Train and Train, then we need:
Thus, there is no possibility of simply copying each list, let alone of using a template, as can be done, if different languages share one project with or without separate namespaces. For further information, see:
Linking to Wikisource and other sister projects
To link to
Wikisource use <nowiki></nowiki>''page name'']]. For example <nowiki></nowiki> () links to the main English language page on Wikisource. But this is a special case of <nowiki></nowiki>''page name'']] <nowiki></nowiki> () and any other sister project language site can be linked to in the same way e.g.:
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<nowiki></nowiki>''page name'']] <nowiki></nowiki> ()
Similarly by substituting the
sister project name any other sister project can be accessed:
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<nowiki></nowiki>''page name'']] <nowiki></nowiki> ()
As with other types of links the first part can be hidden behind a pipe symbol e.g. <nowiki></nowiki> displays .
Interlanguage links in the wider sense
An interlanguage link in the wider sense includes a link to a corresponding page in another language, which, for the software, is a regular link, as opposed to one employing the special interlanguage link
feature as described above. This can also be an internal link on a multilingual project, e.g. on Meta:
Possible reasons for using an "interlanguage link" in the page body include:
Notes
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Use the regular external link syntax (see How to edit a page) in the following cases:
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linking from languages for which the feature is not yet available;
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if you want to specify a text in the link in addition to the language, for example if the subjects of the articles do not quite correspond.
See also
External links
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for details on linking different languages on Meta.
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