This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts H:URL WP:URL

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.

Instructions on this page may not work with VisualEditor. If you have opted in, you can use either VisualEditor or classic editing through wiki markup (wikitext) to edit most pages. The directions on this page, especially about what codes to type to produce formatting effects, are predominantly geared toward wikitext editing. For instructions on editing with VisualEditor, see Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.

When editing a page, hyperlinks to other pages within Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects) are normally made as wikilinks or interwikilinks, using the [[...]] 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: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ 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: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/] gives [1]
• 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: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia] gives Wikimedia

Making a link to elsewhere on the same server as the wiki can be simplified by using ((SERVER)). Example: [((SERVER))/relative/url].

To suppress the external link icon, place the external link between <span class="plainlinks">...</span> tags.

Fixing links with unsupported characters

• The URL must start with a supported URI scheme. http:// and https:// are always supported. ssh://, gopher://, irc://, ircs://, ftp://, ftps://, sftp://, news://, nntp://, worldwind://, telnet://, svn://, git://, mms:// and mailto: 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 %20 (this can be done using the PATH option of the ((urlencode:)) parser function).

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.

• Even though PHP's urlencode() automatically percent-encodes them, these characters do not get URL-encoded by wfUrlencode(). The ":" symbol is a partial exception – it is not encoded anywhere except for IIS 7.0.

English Wikipedia's URLs begin https://en.wikipedia.org/. That address on its own is redirected to the Main Page.

• The main form of a URL to a Wikipedia page:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_name (used in wikilinks, recommended when a URL has to be given)

• An alternative form:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Page_name (allows more options by appending parameters to the URL, not indexed by search engines)

The page name may include a namespace prefix (such as "Help:" in this page). With some special pages it may also include a parameter, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales (but for most special page parameters, see below).

Other URLs associated with a page are constructed by adding a query string. The string can be added to either of the above forms (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train?action=history ), but in this case the system defaults to the second form, i.e. it extends the index.php query string "title=Page_name".

Extended URLs are used:

• To go to a redirect page without following the redirect: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Railway_train&redirect=no
• To go to the edit page (or view the source of a protected page): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&action=edit. Other parameters can be added, such as section=5 or section=new to edit or add a page section. There are also parameters for preloading text into the edit box of a new page, as used by the inputbox extension (see mw:Extension:InputBox).
• To access the edit history of a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&action=history (or further parameters can be added, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&limit=5&offset=90&action=history, which displays edits 91–95).
• To link to a particular version of a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&oldid=1374279 (where oldid is the revision number), or use Template:Oldid. A permanent link to the present version of the page can be accessed by clicking "Permanent link" under "tools" on the left side of the page. The version ID is unique across all pages; the title parameter here has no effect, and can be omitted. Special:PermanentLink/1374279 is a wikilink to a page version.
• To link to a diff between two versions of a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&diff=1374279&oldid=1260056, where diff is the ID of the version to appear on the right. Set diff=0 to compare the current version; set diff=0 and oldid=0 to compare the two most recent versions. Again the title parameter has no real effect (you can in fact compare versions of two different pages). Special:Diff/1374279 is a wikilink to a diff (documentation).
• To watch or unwatch a page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&action=watch (or action=unwatch).
• To purge a page from the server cache (to have it rendered with the latest template versions etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&action=purge (this is not the same as purging your browser cache).
• To perform certain other defined actions, replacing purge in the above example with view, delete, revert, unprotect, info, markpatrolled, validate, render (most of these are available only to administrators).
• To obtain the raw wikitext of a page without downloading the full HTML: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&action=raw
• To display the page in printable version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&printable=yes
• To view a category listing starting from a specified point: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Disambiguation_pages&from=B
• To specify parameters for a special page, as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&from=20030918220000 (in this case the "from" parameter is a timestamp, format yyyymmddhhmmss, UTC time, but many other types of parameter are possible, depending on the page).
• To display a page in a particular skin: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&useskin=monobook. Wikipedia's skins as of 2022 are cologneblue, modern, monobook, vector, vector2. Registered users can set their skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering.
• To display a page with a particular interface language: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&uselang=de (de is the language code for German). Registered users can set their language at Special:Preferences.
• To display a page with a particular banner from a page linked at meta:Special:CentralNotice: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&banner=TranslatorSignup
• The below withgadget will work only with gadgets that have been specifically enabled for inline loading. Registered users can load pages at Special:Gadgets by enabling the corresponding gadget at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets.
• To display a page with a script loaded from the MediaWiki namespace: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Train&withgadget=UTCLiveClock (loads MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js).
• To display a page formatted for mobile devices, add .m after en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train

If constructing URLs for Wikipedia pages, remember to convert spaces into underscores, and to percent-code special characters where necessary, as described in the previous section. (For how to do this in template code, see Templates and programming below.)

Various kinds of error message may appear if an invalid URL, or one to which you do not have access, is submitted. In other cases the URL may redirect to a valid one (for example, page titles are converted to their canonical form as they are when they appear in wikilinks).

Shorter URL

Wikipedia:URLShortener gives a way to make short URLs to Wikipedia pages.

An unofficial redirect site mentioned at User:Tl-lomas/enwp.org also offers shorter URLs.

• https://enwp.org/fullpagename
• https://enwp.org?curid=pageid

enwp.org is not controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation, so it could stop working or change purpose at any time.

The second form can make a long page name into a short code. It uses pageid, which remains accurate even if the page is moved. Pageid has up to 8 digits, shown by clicking "Page information" under "Tools" on the left side of the page.

Other projects use similar URLs to those of English Wikipedia, except that the domain names vary: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ (Meta), https://fr.wikipedia.org/ (French Wikipedia), https://de.wiktionary.org/ (German Wiktionary), etc.

Note that https://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.

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php are used. For details, see mw:API.

• Parameters to index.php at the MediaWiki manual
• WP:URLShortener
• Help:External link icons
• URL help page at Meta
• Category:External link templates