Help:Interlanguage link

As an extension of the possibilities offered by general links, it is possible to add interlinguistic links —known in Wikipedia jargon as “interwikis”—. These links allow the visitor to easily move from an article written in one language to an equivalent article in another language and usually appear at the bottom of the column to the left of the article under the heading "in other languages".

Since March 2013, the interwikis that appear in the articles of the Spanish Wikipedia are hosted in Wikidata, a common database for Wikipedias in all languages, although in some special cases interwikis can be added to the end of article.

If you want to know more about the interlingual life of Wikipedia in different languages, see Wikipedia:Multilingual Coordination.

The quickest way to access Wikidata to add or modify interlanguage links is to click the "Edit Links" button at the bottom of the "in other languages" heading; doing so will open the Wikidata page for that article. If the article in this Wikipedia is not added to Wikidata, you can, if you know it, go to the equivalent article in another language and access it in the same way.

Also from Wikidata it is possible to find out if an article has or not a page of an element there. The best way to see if Wikidata already has a page for the item you want to add is to use the item title search. In the left bar of the screen there is a link to this search by default - it is the fifth link from the top and is titled Item per article or «Item per title». The search page has two input fields. In the field on the left, which says "Site", put the language of the Wikipedia in which the article appears. When you start typing the field creates a dropdown menu to help select the desired language. In the second field, "Page", you must put the exact title of the page as it appears in large letters at the top of the page on Wikipedia. If Wikidata has a page on that topic, the search will return to that page.

Create an element

If an element is missing it can be created. To do this, click the link at the bottom of the item search by title or click Create a new item. By default this link will be the fourth from the top. From any of these links you will arrive at a page that will ask you to give the new entry a label and a description, the purpose of which is to disambiguate two or more items with the same title. If the search for items by title was used, the interface will also include the two fields that have already been filled in in the search. If you used the create a new item link, fill in all the fields and click ⧼wikibase-createentity-submit⧽ when done.

Add interwikis

To add a link, go to the section of the page below the big header that says Site Links and click the [add] button. in the empty row. Two blank fields will be given, one that says "site" and one that says "article." In the field that says "site" the language of the Wikipedia in which the article appears is added. In the field that says "article" put the name of the article as it is written in the title of the corresponding Wikipedia. Both fields contain drop-down lists that will help fill in the information once you have started typing. When both fields have been filled in, click on [save].

Now you can add the rest of the interwikis manually as per the previous step or use the slurpInterwiki plugin to do it automatically. To activate slurpInterwiki you have to go to «Preferences» in the bar at the top right of the screen, there click on the «Accessories» tab and then click again on the slurpInterwiki checkbox. Once this is done, there will be a link on the left side menu that will say "Import interwikis". Clicking on this link will bring up a window that can be used to automatically fill in the rest of the interwikis.

Change an entry

The label, description, alias and interwikis fields are editable. To edit an already existing entry, you must click on the [edit] button in the line you want and add or correct the information. Then click [save]. If an alias or interwiki is incorrect it can be removed. To do so, first press the [edit] button on the line you want and then press the blue X in the box for the alias you want to delete or press the [delete ] in the case of an interwiki. Then click [save]. The data will disappear immediately and will be removed from the database.

There are more than 300 different languages on Wikipedia. To see a complete list with their codes you can click on the complete list of Wiki pages in different languages.

Prior to the implementation of Wikidata, cross-language links were included in the article and each Wikipedia was responsible for maintaining the lists. For example, if a page in one language disappeared or changed its name, the corresponding interwiki had to be removed or changed independently on each of the other language Wikipedias.

In most cases these links can be removed, as long as you verify that the local and Wikidata link lists match. However, local interwikis are sometimes needed to modify Wikidata information.

Local interlanguage links have the following form:

[[Language code: title]

where the title is that of the article on the other Wikipedia and the language code is a code of usually two letters according to the international standard ISO 639 (see the complete list of available wikipedias -in English-). Spanish is "es", English is "en", German is "de", etc.).

Since September 2013, it is only allowed to add interlingual links with this mechanism if they point to sections of the article on the other Wikipedia. The format that must be followed in all new links is this:

[[Language code: Title#section]

Thus, for example, in the article about Esperanto, linguistic links with the following appearance are prohibited:

[[ar: Nederlandsسبرانتو]
[[de: Esperanto]
[[in: Esperanto]
[[whispering]
[[fr: wait]
[[nl: Esperanto]
[[ja: reconciling ]
[[pl: Esperanto]
[[simple: Esperanto]

Like Wikidata's interwikis, these links are displayed in a special heading called "Other Languages": listed in alphabetical order of language names. They can be located anywhere in the original article, although it is best (and common practice) to place them at the bottom of the page. Placing them at the beginning is problematic because it's confusing for novice editors and sometimes they show up in search results where you'd want to see the body of the article. For this reason, it is recommended to put the linguistic links at the bottom of the page, under the "see also" and "external links" sections. The placement does not in any way alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page; they are listed both above and below the article.

Do not include a link to the page of the language in which you are writing.

To make a cross-language link appear somewhere within the page content instead of in the language list, a colon must be added before the language prefix. The following link code to the Sunflower page of the English Wikipedia:

[[:in:SunflowerINDGirasol]]

will become

 Sunflower in English

• When creating an article it is highly recommended that you search for it in other languages in Wikidata and add the (or the) interlinguistic link(s) to the Spanish article or create a new entry if it does not yet exist.

• Wikimedia wiki list: automatic list of all Wikimedia project wikis, with their codes.
• Links to other wikis.
• Template: Interlinguistic link

• Help the edition on Wikidata.