Help:How to Make Links and New Pages

Intro to Linking

To create a link to a page on this wiki, like Peer to Peer, you just type

[[Peer to Peer]]

You'll immediately notice the double brackets. This is "mediawiki markup". This double bracket link is used for an internal link; it points to a page on the wiki called "Peer to Peer".

Link Colours

When you see a red link like Page Does Not Exist it means that the page does not yet exist. If you click on the link you will be given the opportunity to create the page (please don't!). This is a simple way to create new pages when you are editing on the wiki. Just make a link to a page that doesn't exist; then, submit the page, and click on the link to edit the new page. When you do create new pages, please put some meaningful content in the new page straight away.

External links have arrows attached to them like this: http://commonstransition.org/ . Even if a link seems like it might be to a page on the wiki, if it is to an external site outside the wiki, it will have an arrow attached to it. For example P2P Foundation

Making Internal and External Links

There are two types of links in a wiki, internal and external.

Internal links

Internal links use double brackets to surround a page name, and the page name appears as written. If you type

[[P2P Foundation]]

then P2P Foundation shows on the page. Take care to use capitals exactly where they are used in the page name, or else the page may not link properly. You can use a lower-case first letter, and that will automatically be capitalised.

External links

External links use single brackets to surround a URL. If you type:

[http://commonstransition.org/]

with brackets, the URL is not shown, but instead replaced with a number: [1]

To show a plain URL, write the external link without any brackets:

http://commonstransition.org/

shows up as http://commonstransition.org/

Alternative Text for Internal and External Links

You may well want to write a link that uses an alternative text to act as the link to click on.

Internal links

For internal links, keep the double brackets, but add a bar ("|") between the actual page name, and the alternative text you want to show up as the link, all inside the double brackets. So for example, if you write

[[P2P Foundation | The Foundation for P2P Alternatives]]

you get:
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives

Notice that the spaces are kept here, and not replaced with the underscores that you see in the actual URL. For ease of reading, best to put a space on either side of the bar (the "|" character) but that is not strictly necessary.

External links

To have a link text for external links, rather than the URL or just a number, you include the alternative text inside the single brackets but this time you leave out the bar ("|") and simply leave a space between the link and the start of the link text. So if you write:

[http://commonstransition.org/ Commons Transition]

you get:
Commons Transition

Creating New Pages

There are two very simple methods for creating a new page.

1. Type the address into the address bar, with underscores (_) in place of any spaces. Example:

   http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/New_Page_Name_Here

   • The wiki will use this as a prompt to create a new page with the title "New Page Name Here"
   • Be sure to capitalize everything that needs to be, and to check your spelling.
   • It may also work if you leave spaces, rather than replacing the spaces with underscores.

The second method was covered above

1. Visit a page and create a new internal link
   • Click on the link and you will be taken to the new page.
   • Edit and save your new page.