Tutorial (STS Roundtable links)
From STS Roundtable
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Linking wiki articles together is very important. These easily created links allow users to access information related to the article they are reading and greatly add to the wiki's utility.
When to link
The easiest way to learn when to link is to look at existing articles for examples. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself "If I were reading this article, would the link be useful to me?" Usually link the first, and only the first, occurrence of a word/term in the article, that does not have an implicitly understood definition.
How to link
When you want to make a link to another wiki page (called a wiki link) you have to put it in double square brackets, like this:
- [[Sandbox]] = Sandbox
If you want the display text of the link to have a different title, you can do so by adding the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and other keyboards) followed by the alternative name. For example:
- [[Target page|display text]] = display text
You can make a link to a specific section of a page like so:
- [[Target page#Target section|display text]] = display text
If you want the display text of the link to appear in italics or bold, nest the double square brackets for the link within the multiple apostrophes that delimit the italicized or bold text, like this:
- ''[[STS Principles]]'' = STS Principles
Please check your links to ensure they point to the correct article. For example, STS Principles points to the article about the socio-technical system principles, while STS Roundtable is the title of the article about the STS Roundtable organization itself. Piped links are especially useful, as a link to technical systems (technology) is far less readable than a piped link called technical systems even though these two examples go to the same page.
Linking dates
Linking dates may not seem useful; however, please link dates since it enables the use of a user preference in how dates are displayed. An unlinked date, like July 13, 2004, will always be displayed in that manner. If you link the date:
- [[July 13]], [[2004]]
Wikipedia will display it in one of the following ways:
- July 13, 2004
- 13 July 2004
- 2004 July 13
- 2004-07-13
-according to the preference set by the individual user. (This feature is only available to logged-in users and only works if the date is linked.)
Categories
You can also put the article in a category with others in a related topic. Just type [[Category:]], and put the name of the category between the colon and the brackets.
To make a link to a Category page (for example, as a reference for further research), simply put a colon (:) at the beginning of the "Category" tag, like this:
- [[:Category:STS Principles]]
The above code would produce the following:
It is very important to put in the correct categories so that other people can easily find your work. The best way to find which categories to put in is to look at pages on similar subjects, and check which categories they use. For example if you write an article about production metrics, you may look at an article on other types of metrics to see which categories could be appropriate.
