Wikipǣdia:Tutorial (Related site links)

Frontpage, 1: Editing, 2: Formatting, 3: Wikipedia links, 4: Related site links, 5: External links, 6: Talk pages, 7: Keep in mind, 8: Registration, 9: Namespaces, 10: Wrap-up

Related sites

Wikipedia is for prose articles about subjects considered encyclopedic (along with some topics that would typically be found in an almanac).

Any article that simply defines a word, or short phrase, as you would find in a typical dictionary, and that can't be expanded into an encyclopedic entry, should be contributed to Wikipedia's sister project, Wiktionary.

Original source text, such as from a public domain book that you want to post to make it more accessible, should be contributed to one of Wikipedia's other sister projects, Wikisource.

For a list of all related projects, see the Complete list of Wikimedia projects.

Linking to the related sites

Say you have an uncommon word in an article that you write, that you think people might not understand. So you're tempted to try and link to it on Wikipedia, but there isn't enough to say about that word to make a real encyclopedia entry.

Link to its Wiktionary entry. (If Wiktionary doesn't have it yet, do everyone a favor and add it, even if it's just a brief definition. Other Wiktionarians will help flesh it out.)

Instead of the whole URL, you can use a wiki link similar to a regular Wikipedia link but with a special prefix. For example,

[[wiktionary:house]]

will link to the Wiktionary definition of the word "house". In your article it will appear as:

wiktionary:house

you can hide the "wiktionary:" part by adding a "pipe" (vertical bar) character:

[[wiktionary:house|]]

as explained on the previous page, so that the result is:

house

The other projects have similar shortcuts. For more examples, see How to link to Wikimedia projects.

Cross-server links

You are viewing this article on the English version of Wikipedia, but there are Wikipedia editions with articles written in many other languages. To link from the English Wikipedia to the German article on Michael Jackson, type:

[[:de:Michael Jackson]]

(Be sure to use the leading colon.)

It will appear as:

de:Michael Jackson

Similarly, to link from the German Wikipedia back to the article on Michael Jackson in English, type:

[[:en:Michael Jackson]]

It will appear as:

en:Michael Jackson

Because of the large number of articles hosted on Wikipedia (currently 4,597 in English alone — over 1,000,000 in total), each of the approximately 100 different Wikipedia languages has its own server.

The Meta site

There is one main site that serves as a common area to coordinate development of all these sites, Meta-Wikimedia. The Meta and Wikipedia sites can be linked to in a similar manner:

One may link to the Meta by typing something such as:
[[meta:Wikimedia News]]
One may link back to the English 'pedia from Meta by typing something such as:
[[wikipedia:Michael Jackson]]

To link to a separate project in a different language, one would type something like:

[[w:de:Michael Jackson]]Experiment adiht

Try it! Here's the sandbox for this page.

Continue with the tutorial.

Frontpage, 1: Editing, 2: Formatting, 3: Wikipedia links, 4: Related site links, 5: External links, 6: Talk pages, 7: Keep in mind, 8: Registration, 9: Namespaces, 10: Wrap-up