Editing Help:URL (section)

==Linking to URLs==
{{VE documentation}}{{Linking and page manipulation|linking and diffs}}
When editing a page, hyperlinks to other pages within Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects) are normally made as ''wikilinks'' or ''interwikilinks'', using the <code><nowiki>[[...]]</nowiki></code> 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: <code><nowiki>https://meta.wikimedia.org/</nowiki></code> 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: <code><nowiki>[https://meta.wikimedia.org/]</nowiki></code> gives [https://meta.wikimedia.org/]
* 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: <code><nowiki>[https://meta.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia]</nowiki></code> gives [https://meta.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia]

Making a link to elsewhere on the same server as the wiki can be simplified by using <nowiki>{{SERVER}}</nowiki>. Example: <code><nowiki>[{{SERVER}}/relative/url]</nowiki></code>.

To suppress the external link icon, place the external link between {{tag|span|params=class="plainlinks"}} tags.

===Fixing links with unsupported characters===

{{Shortcut|WP:ENCODE}}
* The URL must start with a supported [[URI scheme]]. <code>http://</code> and <code>https://</code> are always supported. <code>ssh://</code>, <code>gopher://</code>, <code>irc://</code>, <code>ircs://</code>, <code>ftp://</code>, <code>ftps://</code>, <code>sftp://</code>, <code>news://</code>, <code>nntp://</code>, <code>worldwind://</code>, <code>telnet://</code>, <code>svn://</code>, <code>git://</code>, <code>mms://</code> and <code>mailto:</code> 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 <code>%20</code> (this can be done using the PATH option of the [[Help:Parser function#Paths|{{tlc|urlencode:}}]] parser function).
{{incomplete list}}
{| class="wikitable"
! sp !! " !! ' !! , !! ; !! < !! > !! ? !! [ !! ] !! { !! <nowiki>|</nowiki> !! }
|-
| %20 || %22 || %27 || %2C || %3B || %3C || %3E || %3F || %5B || %5D || %7B || %7C || %7D
|}
:{{small|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.
{| class="wikitable"
! newline !! [ !! ] !! &#124;
|-
| space || &amp;#91; || &amp;#93; || &amp;#124;
|}

* Even though PHP's [https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php urlencode()] automatically percent-encodes them, these characters do '''not''' get URL-encoded by [https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/includes/GlobalFunctions.php#L309 wfUrlencode()]. The ":" symbol is a partial exception – it is not encoded anywhere except for IIS 7.0.

{| class="wikitable"
! ; !! @ !! $ !! ! !! * !! ( !! ) !! , !! / !! ~ !! :
|-
| %3B || %40 || %24 || %21 || %2A || %28 || %29 || %2C || %2F || %7E || %3A
|}