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Introduction to Wikis Tutorials

Wikipedia / Linking




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In this section, we're going to cover linking with Wikipedia. What is a Wikipedia link? It simply is a link to another internal article within Wikipedia. Wikipedia links are simply created within the wiki code by placing double brackets around the topic name. For example here, I have Paris between double brackets is the city of light. So what that will do is that will simply create a link to the Paris article within that sentence. To link to a different target page, then it appears in the link, the proper syntax is within double brackets, the target followed by a pipe, then the actual link text that you want to see. And I have an example here. Say I have this sentence, the Parisian metro system is the second busiest in Europe. But instead of linking to the Parisian article, which may not be valid, I want to instead link to the Paris article. So simply I put within double brackets Paris, then the pipe and then Parisian. So the link text actually says Parisian, but it links to the Paris article. And if you're interested in checking out more about links, I would highly recommend you check out the official page for linking within Wikipedia and that is at http colon slash slash en.Wikipedia.org slash wiki slash Wikipedia colon how underscore to underscore edit underscore a underscore page. It's a long link but it's well worth checking out. So finally, here some guidelines for linking in Wikipedia. You only want to link to topics that will help broaden the reader's understanding by expanding their knowledge of a related topic. Don't over link a topic. Once a paragraph is plenty. As you can imagine within an article of maybe the Parisian metro system, the word Paris comes up a lot, but you wouldn't want to link it every time you come across the word Paris. That would get very, very redundant and, and just messes the style of the article up completely. So just don't over link it. Finally, don't link more than ten percent of the words in an article. There's a lot of articles out there and really you can create a whole article that has just link after link after link, but that's not really advised. Again, that makes for a very messy and busy interface, so don't link more than ten percent of words in an article and you'll be fine. If you follow these steps, you'll be linking like a pro in no time.

Tutorial Information

Course: Introduction to Wikis
Author: Dawn Dunkerly
SKU: 33853
ISBN: 1-934743-52-6
Release Date: 2008-02-27
Duration: 3.5 hrs / 58 lessons
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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