Help:URL

Revision as of 10:09, 30 September 2005 by Fisherad (talk | contribs) (URLs of pages within the projects)

URLs in external links

A link in external link style can be of the forms:

  • target: http://meta.wikimedia.org/ is rendered as http://meta.wikimedia.org/
  • [ target label ], with a blank space in between: [http://meta.wikimedia.org/ wikimedia] gives wikimedia (see also Help:Piped link)
  • [ target ] - these are automatically labelled with serial numbers 1, 2, 3, ...: [http://meta.wikimedia.org/] gives [1]

The target is a URL which can start with "http://" or "ftp://"; "file://" does not work (by default; and if enabled, it only works in MSIE).

All characters of the URL must be among: A-Z a-z 0-9 ._\/~%-+&#?!=()@

If a URL contains a different character it should be converted; for example, ^ has to be written %5e, the hexadecimal ASCII value with a percent sign in front. A blank space can also be converted into an underscore.

Conversion:

 "   #   $   %   &   '   *   ,   :   ;   <   >   ?   [   ^   `   {   |   }
%22 %23 %24 %25 %26 %27 %2a %2c %3a %3b %3c %3e %3f %5b %5e %60 %7b %7c %7d

For the other characters either the code or the character can be used in internal and external links, they are equivalent. The system does a conversion when needed. E.g.

[[%C3%80_propos_de_M%C3%A9ta]]

is rendered as À_propos_de_Méta, almost like À propos de Méta, which leads to this page on Meta with in the address bar the URL

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_propos_de_M%C3%A9ta

while http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_propos_de_Méta leads to the same.

URLs of pages within the projects

See. On other projects everything works the same, except that the domain names vary:

For use in templates, note that all URLs on e.g. the English Wikipedia can be written in the form

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title={{{1}}}

This requires {{{1}}} to be written with underscores and escape codes (if applicable). To benefit from the conversion carried out by localurl, two parameters are needed:

http://en.wikipedia.org{{localurl:{{{1}}}|{{{2}}}}}

(see Template talk:Url 2p). An example with the second parameter in localurl fixed is Template:Tcw.

This works for a link in external link style to a page in the same project or a project which uses the same string in the URL between the server name and the question mark ($wgScript, on Wikimedia "/w/index.php"), but not for links to other projects.

Old versions of pages

All old versions of all pages are numbered (with oldid) approximately in the order of becoming an old version, i.e. in chronological order of the next edit of the same page.

See also Linking to specific versions of articles.

New pages

New pages are numbered (with curid) chronologically.

See also Multiple titles.

Template:New

Edit

Examples:

Purge

In some cases of caching problems, to update a page it can help to use "action=purge", in a URL like https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/index.php?title=Help:URL&action=purge

Kinds of dead links

There can be various kinds of errors in the URL. With some the server is not even reached, with others the server takes some action. The server may also go to the correct page and just ignore a wrong parameter or anchor.

See also

Help:Namespace, Eliminating index.php from the url.

Template:H:f