Help:Colon trick
This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
Linking and page manipulation |
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The colon trick is a method of providing a link to a
By adding a
Examples
[[Category:Help]]
would list this page in Category:Help, but[[:Category:Help]]
will produce a link to Category:Help.[[File:Wikipedia-logo.png]]
would display an image, but[[:File:Wikipedia-logo.png]]
will produce a link to File:Wikipedia-logo.png.[[pt:Internet]]
will create aninterlanguage link, but(in the Portuguese Wikipedia).[[:pt:Internet]]
will produce an interwiki link to pt:Internet[[//Hus]]
will produce an (invalid) external link wrapped in brackets ("[[1]]"), but[[://Hus]]
will produce a link to//Hus.[[Computer]]
links to the Computer article; adding a colon like[[:Computer]]
can be done, but the colon is unneeded and makes no difference.
With templates
A colon can also be used to transclude a page in mainspace, rather than template space. For example, {{The Beatles}}
will transclude Template:The Beatles, but {{:The Beatles}} will transclude the mainspace article The Beatles. This is useful when the mainspace article has been specially formatted to be transcluded in other articles, by using <noinclude> or <includeonly> tags to indicate the portion that should be included when the article is transcluded.
With edit summaries
Normally, linking to a user page in an edit summary sends a notification to the user. A colon can be used to escape this behaviour. For example, the edit summary "corrected typo by [[User:Example]]
" will ping User:Example, but "corrected typo by [[:User:Example]]
" will not.