Help:URL
 | 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. |
Like all pages on the World Wide Web, the pages delivered by Wikimedia's servers have URLs to identify them. These are the addresses that appear in your browser's address bar when you view a page. Wikipedia editors also have the ability to create hyperlinks to chosen URLs, pointing to pages either within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, or elsewhere on the Web.
Linking to URLs
 |  The instructions on this page may not be compatible with VisualEditor. If you have opted in, you can use either VisualEditor or classic editing with wiki markup (wikitext) to edit most pages. The directions here, particularly those involving formatting codes, are primarily intended for wikitext editing. For guidance on using VisualEditor, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide. |
| Linking and page manipulation |
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When editing a page, hyperlinks to other pages within Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects) are normally made as wikilinks or interwikilinks, using the [[...]] syntax described at Help:Link. However if you want to link to an outside website, or to certain specially generated Wikimedia pages (such as a past version of an article), it is necessary to provide the full URL. This is done using external link syntax.
There are three forms of external link syntax:
- If the URL is simply included in the wikitext, without square brackets, then it appears as written, and a hyperlink is created:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/produces https://meta.wikimedia.org/ - If the URL is placed in square brackets, then a hyperlink is created with a serial number as its label:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/]gives [1] - If the URL is placed in square brackets followed by a space and some text, then that text is used as the label for the hyperlink:
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia]gives Wikimedia
Making a link to elsewhere on the same server as the wiki can be simplified by using {{SERVER}}. Example: [{{SERVER}}/relative/url].
To suppress the external link icon, place the external link between <span class="plainlinks">...</span> tags.
Fixing links with unsupported characters
- The URL must start with a supported URI scheme.
http://andhttps://are always supported.gopher://,irc://,ircs://,ftp://,news://,nntp://,worldwind://,telnet://,svn://,git://,mms://andmailto:will create a link and an icon but require an agent registered in the browser. - URLs containing certain characters will display and link incorrectly unless those characters are percent-encoded. For example, a space must be replaced by
%20(this can be done using the PATH option of the{{urlencode:}}parser function).
 | This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. |
| sp | " | ' | , | ; | < | > | ? | [ | ] | { | | | } |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| %20 | %22 | %27 | %2C | %3B | %3C | %3E | %3F | %5B | %5D | %7B | %7C | %7D |
- Single apostrophes do not need to be encoded; but unencoded multiples will be parsed as italic or bold markup
- Titles containing certain characters will display and link incorrectly unless those characters are encoded with HTML character references.
| newline | [ | ] | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| space | [ | ] | | |
- Even though PHP's urlencode() automatically percent-encodes them, these characters do not get URL-encoded by wfUrlencode(). The ":" symbol is a partial exception – it is not encoded anywhere except for IIS 7.0.
| ; | @ | $ | ! | * | ( | ) | , | / | ~ | : |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| %3B | %40 | %24 | %21 | %2A | %28 | %29 | %2C | %2F | %7E | %3A |
URLs on other Wikimedia projects
Other projects use similar URLs to those of English Wikipedia, except that the domain names vary: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ (Meta), https://fr.wikipedia.org/ (French Wikipedia), https://de.wiktionary.org/ (German Wiktionary), etc.
Note that https://www.wikipedia.org leads to an international Wikipedia portal page, but other URLs beginning with that prefix redirect to English Wikipedia.
Other projects may also use different strings in place of "/w/" and "/wiki/" in URLs. For details, see the URL help page on Meta.
Templates and programming
For use in templates, correct URLs can be constructed using certain magic words and parser functions such as fullurl, urlencode and others. Details of these can be found at mw:Help:Magic words.
Most programmatic interaction with Wikipedia can be performed most efficiently using the API, for which URLs beginning https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php are used. For details, see mw:API.