Quick recap for those of you just joining us. This is part 4 in a 5-part series entitled, “Simple Tips to Improve a RichmondWiki Article.” Parts 1 through 3 dealt with adding categories, creating a Google Map, and incorporating templates, respectively.
Today’s topic is simple. It’s all about how to link between articles and the importance of those links.
Pages with similar topics often reference other related articles. For example, the RichmondWiki article on Oregon Hill mentions that it overlooks Belle Isle. Since we have an article for Belle Isle, we want to create a link between the two.
Link to Belle Isle
How to Add a Link
In wikitext, this is easy. No fooling around with HTML code or any of that nonsense. Simply click the “edit” button and place double brackets around the name of the article you want to link to, like this:
[[Belle Isle]]
This tells MediaWiki to automagically create a link to the article named “Belle Isle” when the page is saved, even if the Belle Isle article doesn’t even exist yet. Creating a link to a nonexistent article is known as “lazy linking”. See below for more information and why this is helpful.
In this case capitalization matters, so if you were to link to “Belle isle” it would take you to a different page.
Red Links vs. Blue Links
If the Belle Isle article already exists when the link is created, it will show up as blue (purple if you’ve visited that page before).
If the article you link to does not exist yet, the link will be red.
This is the easiest way to tell if an article exists yet. Now, see all the red links throughout RichmondWiki? Click one and start adding content!
Change the Link Text
Want to link to the “Belle Isle” article but change the link text to say “island in the middle of the river”? Simply add a vertical pipe character “|” to distinguish between the name of the article and the link text you want to specify. This example would be written:
[[Belle Isle|island in the middle of the river]]
and appear as island in the middle of the river.
Lazy Linking
As mentioned above, “lazy linking” helps grow the wiki by pointing out which articles are more in demand. The more “lazy” links an article has, the more people are trying to link to it. If you are adding or updating an article, don’t be afraid to link to an article that doesn’t exist yet.
The “Wanted Pages” report lists all of the articles that are linked to but have not yet been written. This is just one of the useful features that the MediaWiki software offers to help identify which content should be added next. More of these types of reports are available on the Special Pages page.
In Summary
Adding links between articles is easy and helps other users find interesting and relevant content. It also helps the wiki grow simply by pointing out which pages are more popular and which pages need to be created next.
Tomorrow’s Post will demonstrate how to upload images and add them to articles. Got a question? Leave a comment or just start experimenting on the wiki. You can’t break it, and any changes can always be undone if you don’t like it.
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