Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 8 (section)

== Do colons break wiki links on 3rd party sites? ==

It seems that using a colon (:) within a wiki link causes that text to be supressed on third party sites. 

Example:
The entry for [[Haven Kimmel]] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haven_Kimmel) has four books listed under the 'Works' heading. On a third-party site such as TheFreeDictionary.com (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Haven%20Kimmel), the two titles with colons are suppressed.

Is this a known issue? Would using the ASCII code for the colon fix this?  -- [[User:Metabolome|Metabolome]] 18:50, 2004 Sep 18 (UTC)

:Hmm, that's interesting.  It certainly seems to work as you describe.  Probably the third-party site is mistaking links containing colons for interwiki links, links to other namespaces, or category links, and it doesn't want to display those.  However, [[Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Be_careful_with_special_characters]] suggests that colons in article titles are okay, as long as the part before the colon doesn't coincide with a namespace or language code.

:My experimenting suggests that using Unicode escape sequences in wikilinks doesn't work, so I think we've got to stick to typing them from the keyboard as usual and live with the fact that they display wrong on third-party sites.  Anyway, the real problem here is bad code at the third-party site, and I don't think we should go out of our way to compensate for their problems.  You could contact the site administrator and draw their attention to the problem if you wanted to.  [[User:Triskaideka|<nowiki></nowiki>]]&mdash;[[User:Triskaideka|Triskaideka]] 19:48, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

::I agree, particularly with this site.  If [[TheFreeDictionary.com]] chooses to employ aggressive filtering to remove references to [[Wikipedia]] and even [[wiki]], I see no reason why Wikipedia should be expected to accommodate bugs they may have introduced.  --[[User:Eequor|[[User:Eequor|η]]<span style="vertical-align: text-bottom">[[Image:Venus symbol (blue).gif|♀]]</span>[{{SERVER}}{{localurl:User talk:Eequor}} υωρ]]] 20:18, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A couple observations after more research:
* Other 3rd party sites (e.g., [http://www.smartpedia.com/ SmartPedia] and [http://www.wordiq.com/ WordIQ] don't seem to have a problem parsing links with colons, whether they use the full Wikipedia implementation or a stripped-down version without links.
* Other Wikipedia entries that contain links with colons use piped aliases, and these seem to transfer intact to TheFreeDictionary.com.  See e.g. [[Neil Postman]] ([[Amusing Ourselves to Death|Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business]]) and [[Neal Stephenson]] ([[The Diamond Age|The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer]]).
* I agree with both of you that it's not a Wikipedia problem, but I still want the entries to be as complete as possible on the site of whoever uses the content. 
Thanks for the replies.  -- [[User:Metabolome|Metabolome]] 00:13, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)