Editing Help:Link (section)

== Conversion to canonical form ==
{{See|mw:Manual:Title.php#Canonical forms}}
As [[#Wikilinks|described previously]], if a link target begins with a lower case letter, it will be interpreted as if it began with the equivalent capital letter. If the target contains a [[Help:Namespace|namespace]] prefix, then the whole prefix and the first character after the colon are case-insensitive (so [[uSeR:jimbo Wales]] links to [[User:Jimbo Wales]]).

In link targets, spaces and underscores (which are effectively equivalent) are ignored if they come at the start, at the end, or immediately before or after the colon following a namespace prefix. Consecutive spaces / underscores are treated as a single space. Hence [[_User_: Jimbo_ __ Wales__]] links to [[User:Jimbo Wales]].

[[HTML character reference]]s and [[percent encoding|percent-encoded]] characters are replaced with their raw character. For example, <code><nowiki>[[d&amp;eacute;partement]]</nowiki></code> produces [[d&eacute;partement]], and <code><nowiki>[[%40]]</nowiki></code> produces [[%40]]. Links which resolve to [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)|invalid page titles]] are displayed as unmarked-up wikitext.

Titles indicated by wikilinks are displayed in canonical form (with correction of capitalization and excess spaces / underscores removed, as described previously) in the following places:
* In [[Help:Transclusion|transclusion]] tags for non-existent pages: <code><nowiki>{{qwsazx}}</nowiki></code> gives [[Template:Qwsazx]].
* In tooltips and in the status bar (if applicable for the browser) when the mouse cursor is moved over the link.
* On [[Help:Redirect|redirect]] pages.
* In the [[WP:Category|category]] box.

The prefixes in [[Help:Interwiki linking|interwiki links]] are treated similarly to namespace prefixes: they are insensitive to case and to spaces before and after the colon. However the first character after the colon is ''not'' automatically capitalized (whether it is interpreted as a capital depends on the configuration of the target wiki).