Help:Interlanguage links
With the current Wikipedia software, it's possible to add interlanguage links into articles, so a visitor can easily hop from the article in one language to the same subject in one of the other Wikipedias in another language.
(At the moment, these links only work from the English wiki; 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 available non-English wikis. 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:Esperanto]][[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.
(You don't need to include the link to the language you're, but it doesn't hurt either.)
Notes
There are still a few oddities related to character encoding; for the moment, links to the Japanese, Polish, and Esperanto wikis (and any other non-Latin-1 wiki) can't just be written in directly if they contain non-ASCII characters. In that case, copy the title section out of the URL for the article, including any %XX hex codes and the like. For instance:
- [[eo:Philip Jos%C3%A9 FARMER]] for Philip José FARMER (Esperanto; uses UTF-8)
- [[eo:Euxropa Unio]] for Eŭropa Unio (Esperanto; modified code)
- [[pl:Wojna ameryka%F1sko-meksyka%F1ska]] (Polish Wojna amerykańsko-meksykańska; Latin-2)
- [[ja:%90%A2%8AE%82%CC%8D%91]] (Japanese [http://ja.wikipedia.com/wiki/%90%A2%8AE%82%CC%8D%91 世界の国]; Shift-JIS) 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.