Help:URL

From HMCwiki

Editing overview

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Organizing

Fixing mistakes

Saving effort

Communicating

Frequently Asked Questions

1 URLs in external links
2 URLs of pages within the projects
- 2.1 Use in templates
3 Old versions of pages
4 New pages
5 Edit
6 Purge
7 Kinds of dead links
8 See also
9 Links to other help pages

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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. If enabled it only works in MSIE. To enable it, add a $wgUrlProtocols entry to LocalSettings.php; see the $wgUrlProtocols in DefaultSettings.php for example.

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.

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URLs of pages within the projects

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

xx.wikipedia.org with xx the language code
meta.wikimedia.org (meta.wikipedia.org redirects there)
xx.wiktionary.org
xx.wikiquote.org
xx.wikibooks.org
wikisource.org
he.wikisource.org
sep11.wikipedia.org

A URL starting with www.wikipedia.org redirects to the corresponding one starting with en; only www.wikipedia.org itself leads to a portal page instead of the main page of the English Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org

In projects outside Wikimedia the "w/" in URLs like http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=history is sometimes not used, sometimes different, e.g.:

The default is /wiki/wiki.phtml, with in DefaultSetting.php [2]:

$wgScriptPath = "/wiki";
$wgScript     = "{$wgScriptPath}/wiki.phtml";

There may be other variations, compare:

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Use in templates

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}}}}}

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.

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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.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:Link&oldid=53587 - normal link to old page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?oldid=53587 - no page name in the URL, goes to the correct page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:Link&oldid=53588 - number and name do not correspond; the name is ignored
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=abc&oldid=53587 - non-existing page name; oldid is ignored, works like going to a non-existing page, except for the links to assumed previous and next versions, and on editing, for the warning of editing an old version of a page.

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New pages

New pages are numbered (with curid) chronologically.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=x&curid=9906 - gives the page with correct full name

From MediaWiki 1.5 page versions get a number "oldid" as soon as they are created; they are produced by variable {{REVISIONID}}. The URL is like in the previous section.

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Edit

Examples:

Edit the whole page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:URL&action=edit
Edit the 5th section: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:URL&action=edit&section=5
Add at the end: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:URL&action=edit&section=1000 (use large section number)
Ditto with "Post a comment" feature: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Help:URL&action=edit&section=new

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Purge

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

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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.