With the current
Wikipedia software, in addition to the general external link feature, it is possible to add
interlanguage links into articles. They allow a visitor to easily hop from the article in one language to the same subject in one of the others, see
Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.
At the moment, these links work from the English, German (http://de.wikipedia.org/), Danish (http://da.wikipedia.org/), Japanese (http://ja.wikipedia.org/), Dutch (http://nl.wikipedia.org/), Spanish (http://es.wikipedia.org/), Polish (http://pl.wikipedia.org/), Esperanto (http://eo.wikipedia.org/), French (http://fr.wikipedia.org/), Czech (http://cs.wikipedia.org/),
Chinese (http://zh.wikipedia.org/) and
Swedish (http://sv.wikipedia.org/) wikis; as the software is adapted for other languages the others will be upgraded and a full back-and-forth network can be put in place.
The interlanguage links take the following form:
- [[language code:Title]]
where the language code is the 2-letter code as per ISO 639. (See Complete list of language wikis available. English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the article on Esperanto, which is available on a lot of other wikis, the interlanguage links would look like so:
- [[de:Esperanto]] [[en:Esperanto]] [[eo:Esperanto]] [[es:Esperanto]] [[fr:Espéranto]] [[ja:エスペラント]] [[nl:Esperanto]] [[pl:Esperanto]]
These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special header section "Other languages:" listed by language name. They can go anywhere in the article source; at the top is conventional, however this is somewhat problematic -- it's confusing for newbie editors, and the links often show up in search results where one would have preferred to see body text. For this reason, some recommend putting the language links at the bottom of the page, along with external links and 'see also's. Placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page in any way; they are listed at both the top and the bottom.
(You don't need to include the link to the language you're writing in.)
- If you work on one of the international Wikipedias (and if you don't, you should!), you might want to keep track of new pages there and check for English articles on the same subjects, so you can add a link there from here.
- If you create a link to a Wikipedia that also has the interlanguage links available, please create a back-link in the other direction as well. It would also be good to copy the other interlanguage links on the two pages.
- Sort interlanguage links alphabetically!
- Interlanguage links in talk pages and on the Meta-Wikipedia will appear inline in the text, like regular links, so you can cite other pages in discussion.
- Note that the syntax for interlanguage links is similar to that for linking to pages on other wikis: InterWiki links.
- You can link to the meta wikipedia using "m" in place of a language code or the full interwiki prefix MetaWikiPedia.
- Use the regular external link syntax (see Wikipedia:How to edit a page) in the following cases:
- linking to an article in another language other than the corresponding article, for example, linking the English page on the Norwegian language to the home page of the Norwegian wikipedia (in addition to linking to the Norwegian page on the Norwegian language);
- linking from languages for which the feature is not yet available;
- if you want to specify a text in the link in addition to the language, for example if the subjects of the articles do not quite correspond.
Depending on your browser, you may not be able to simply cut-n-paste the text of article names into the Latin1-based wikis (English, German, French, etc) from non-Latin1 wikis (Japanese, Esperanto, Polish, etc). In that case, you can copy the %XX hex codes from the URL, or use some external program to convert the Unicode text into numeric HTML entities.
Examples:
- [[eo:Eŭropa Unio]] or [[eo:E%C5%ADropa Unio]] (Esperanto Eŭropa Unio (http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C5%ADropa_Unio); also X-system backwards compatibility, eg [[eo:Euxropa Unio]])
- [[pl:Wojna amerykańsko-meksykańska]] or [[pl:Wojna ameryka%C5%84sko-meksyka%C5%84ska]] (Polish Wojna amerykańsko-meksykańska (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojna_ameryka%F1sko-meksyka%F1ska); (also backwards compatibilty with Latin-2: [[pl:Wojna ameryka%F1sko-meksyka%F1ska]])
- [[ja:世界の国]] or [[ja:%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E3%81%AE%E5%9B%BD]] (Japanese 世界の国 (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E3%81%AE%E5%9B%BD); Unicode only)
If at some point this system becomes difficult to manage, a tool will be set up for conveniently updating the link sets between wikis to keep things consistent.