Help:Interwiki linking

This help page is a how-to guide.

It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

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Interwiki linking can be a link to another project, to another language and both, to another project in another language.

Interproject links: By adding a prefix to another Wikimedia project, internal link style ("prefixed internal link style") can be used to link to a page of another project. A system of short-handed link labels is used to refer to different projects, in the context of interproject linking, as seen within the actual source text.

For example, to link from here to the "surfeit" article on Wiktionary, you have to include the interwiki link [[wikt:surfeit]] which would appear as wikt:surfeit or the interwiki link [[wikt:surfeit|surfeit]] which would appear as surfeit.

Interlanguage links: These are interwiki links linking different language editions of the same project. Wikimedia Projects with different language editions are:
- Wikipedia
- Wiktionary
- Wikisource
- Wikiquote
- Wikibooks
- Wikiversity
- Wikivoyage
- Wikinews
There are two types of interlanguage links: those displayed in the page's languages dropdown menu and those displayed inline. Here an example for both types if placed in the English Wikipedia article Apple:
1. [[fr:Pomme]]: This produces a link to the French Wikipedia article Pomme in the "Languages" menu of the page. Note: Since 2013 this type of interlanguage link is usually centralized through Wikidata, which you can edit either by opening the Wikidata item, or selecting "Add language".
2. [[:fr:Pomme]]: This produces an inline interlanguage link fr:Pomme in the English Wikipedia article.

This is called interwiki. For each project, an interwiki map (a list of target projects with their prefixes) is specified (Special:Interwiki). These target projects do not require MediaWiki and do not even have to be a wiki.