An interlanguage link or ILL is a small navigational aide that connects the current article to the same topic in another language. So that they are easily discoverable, they exist in the same places on every wiki in the FANDOM network. That way, if you're reading the English article on Star Trek's Uhura, you know where to look for the link to the Spanish version.
You can find ILLs at the top of pages, just to the upper right of the Edit button.
ILLs are also at the bottom of article pages. Note that languages are given their native names, not their name in your language.
Setup
Interlanguage links are not created by default. They have to be requested and added after wiki creation. This is because there can be duplicate communities in the same language, making the choice of language partner occasionally problematic. Ideally, both sides of the link need to agree to the partnership. For this reason, and others, some communities have established rules about whom they'll link to. Before putting in a formal link request, it's always a good idea to talk to the leaders of the community to whom you wish to link.
Once you've figured out that you're a good fit, make a formal request at the Interlanguage link requests page on Community Central.
After the links are set up, it might take up to 24 hours for the links to work, for caching reasons.
Usage
General form
Interlanguage links are created like this:
[[language code:article name]]
For example, the following creates a link to 首頁
[[zh:首頁]]
Most of the time, it's necessary to get and spell correctly the name of the article in the target language. This means you'll end up with a block of differently-named links, like this:
[[ca:Ajuda:Enllaços interlingüístics]] [[de:Hilfe:Interlanguage-Links]] [[es:Ayuda:Enlaces interlingüísticos]] [[fi:Ohje:Kieltenväliset linkit]]
Main pages and other pages with the same name in different languages
However, if you're on your wiki's main page, you can save yourself quite a few keystrokes. Deep within the core of the MediaWiki software that underpins FANDOM, main pages all have the same name. So you don't have to specify the names of your fellow wikis. This'll do just fine:
[[ca:]] [[de:]] [[es:]] [[fi:]]
That's also true for any pages where the name is the same in different languages.
Placement
Though an ILL may be placed anywhere on a page and still work, they are most commonly placed at the bottom of the page. Some wikis might even have rules which require that the ILLs be at the bottom of the page, so be sure to ask around before starting to publish a lot of ILLs.
Inline usage
To make an inline ILL—that is, one that appears in the body of your article's text rather than the ILL section of the page, put a colon before the language code. For example, this...
[[:es:Ayuda:Interlenguajes]]
... will look like this when the page is saved: es:Ayuda:Enlaces interlingüísticos.
See also
Further help and feedback
- Browse and search other help pages at Help:Contents
- Check Fandom Community Central for sources of further help and support
- Check Contacting Fandom for how to report any errors or unclear steps in this article