"WP:Piping" redirects here. For the Wikipedia Manual of Style for disambiguation pages, see WP:PIPING. A piped link is a link where the hyperlinked (underlined, clickable) text displayed on a Wikipedia page is different from the title of the page to which the text links. For example, [[Train station|station]] displays as station, but links to the Train station wiki page.
Use
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Piped links are useful for preserving the grammatical structure and flow of a sentence when:
- the wording of the exact link title does not fit in context, or
- there are multiple meanings of the word (see "Mercury" example on the Disambiguation page).
To create the pipe ("|") character, you may press (SHIFT + BACKSLASH) on English-layout and other keyboards. More simply, note that the pipe character is the third character which appears in the "wiki markup" section of symbols at the bottom of the symbol page which appears in "edit this page" mode. Clicking on the pipe symbol there inserts it at the cursor spot, just as happens for any symbol chosen from this page. For full details on how to use this feature, see Help:Piped link.
There is disagreement about whether it is appropriate to pipe year numbers to "year-in-x" articles (such as [[2006 in sports|2006]]). According to the Wikipedia Manual of Style:
- Another possibility is to link to a more specific article about that year, for example [[2006 in sports|2006]], although some people find this unintuitive because the link leads to an unexpected destination.
Piped year links should not be used when the date is a full date, including the day and the month, because it stops readers' date preferences working. For example, do not write [[5 August]] [[2006 in sports|2006]] or [[August 5]], [[2006 in sports|2006]].
When not to use
First of all, keep links as simple as possible:
- Avoid making links longer than necessary: write President [[George W. Bush]], not [[George W. Bush|President George W. Bush]].
- It is not necessary to pipe links simply to avoid redirects. The number of links to a redirect page can be a useful gauge of when it would be helpful to spin off a subtopic of an article into its own page.
- Given the option to pipe a link or to "blend" an affix, preferred style is to use a blended affix. Write simply [[Public transport]]ation instead of complicated [[Public transport|Public transportation]]. Both display identically as Public transportation.
- Never use piped links to convert first letter to lower case: write simply [[public transport]] instead of complicated [[Public transport|public transport]]. Both display identically as public transport.
Intuitiveness
Keep piped links as intuitive as possible. Do not use piped links to create "easter egg links", that require the reader to follow them before understanding what's going on. Also remember there are people who print the articles. For example, do not write this:
- ...and by mid-century the puns and sexual humor were (with only a few [[Thomas Bowdler|exceptions]]) back in to stay.
The readers will not see the hidden reference to Thomas Bowdler unless they click or hover over the piped exceptions link — in a print version, there is no link to select, and the reference is lost. Instead, reference the article explicitly:
- ...and by mid-century the puns and sexual humor were (with only a few exceptions; ''see'' [[Thomas Bowdler]]) back in to stay.
Similarly:
Categories
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In the case of a category link, a piped link serves to sort the article alphabetically within the category. For example, to place Albert Einstein in Category:Physicists, you can link the article to [[Category:Physicists|Einstein, Albert]], and the category will then alphabetize him under Einstein rather than Albert.
Templates
The pipe character is also used when supplying parameters to templates; this is not the same thing as a piped link.
See also
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