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.
Dropping http: and https:
If you make an external style link using square brackets [...] from a Wikimedia page to other Wikimedia page, including Wikipedia of course, it's better to drop the protocol http: or https:, so that the URL begins with //..., e.g. //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:URL.
Otherwise, readers are forced to use the specified connection method. If you don't specify the protocol, readers can continue to use the protocol to read that page.
The URL returned by {{SERVER}} magic word begins with //.
- Example:
[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:URL no protocol] - Result: no protocol (Read this page both with http and https.)
- Example:
[{{SERVER}}/w/index.php?title=Help:URL no protocol] - Result: no protocol (Read this page both with http and https.)
URLs on other Wikimedia projects
Other projects use similar URLs to those of English Wikipedia, except that the domain names vary: http://meta.wikimedia.org/ (Meta), http://fr.wikipedia.org/ (French Wikipedia), http://de.wiktionary.org/ (German Wiktionary), etc.
Note that http://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 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php are used. For details, see mw:API.