Manual:Interwiki

Interwiki links are links to pages of other projects, using a prefixed internal link style.

Interwiki links make it possible to link to pages of (e.g.) Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews etc. or to your wiki-project in different languages. (See Manual:Wiki familyManual:Wiki family.)

A link like [[Wikipedia:Main Page]] will appear like this: Wikipedia:Main Page and redirect you to Wikipedia's Main Page.

Interwiki links to other projects[edit]

Interwiki links are hosted in the interwikiManual:interwiki table table of the Mediawiki database. The list is available from the interwikimap property of the siteinfoAPI:Siteinfo meta query API, in other words api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap

Warning: The api interwikimap property gives incorrect results on wikis using the interwiki cache (like Wikimedia Wikis) prior to MediaWiki 1.19 (Bug 19838)

Default[edit]

Several Wikimedia projects (and others) are ready for interwiki linking by default, so you can use them without editing your database.

The following are some examples of interwiki prefixes which are available by default (Wikipedia is also available, 1.10 and after):

The full list of default interwiki lists is available at maintenance/interwiki.list

See m:Help:Interwiki linking for complete information on linking from/to Wikimedia projects.

 Note: In some installations none of these is pre-installed. Try [[metawikipedia:Main Page]] in this case.

Adding a new website for interwiki linking[edit]

• Interwiki links are set in the interwiki table of the database.
• To modify these, you will need to edit the database, as below.
• You might prefer to install an Interwiki extension, which eases the process.

^[1]

As Wikipedia isn't set up by default prior to version 1.10, you might want to add it (and other projects that you desire).

The examples below show how to set up w: as a link to the English Wikipedia.

The idea is to insert a line of the form:

('prefix', 'URL format string', 1, 0)

into the interwiki table.

Single line[edit]

Advanced users may use a single command line, as follows:

• MySQL and PostgreSQL

INSERT INTO interwiki (iw_prefix, iw_url, iw_local, iw_trans) VALUES ('w', 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1', 1, 0);

Newer MediaWiki versions require some extra fields such as iw_wikiid.

Export, add, re-import[edit]

Alternatively, you can use the following multi-step process, which exports the interwiki table, adds a line, then re-imports it:

• Export the database table interwiki
• add to the end of the table a line of the following form (using English wikipedia as an example):

('w', 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1', 1, 0);

 Note: In the above code, the semicolon ';' as seen, MUST be at the end of the table. At the end of any other line within that table Only has ','.

• Import the database table interwiki

To test[edit]

To test configuration:

• Go to your site,
• create an article, with the following content:

  [[w:Wikipedia:Village pump|]]

• This should display a link to the 'Village pump' page on en.Wikipedia.org (the url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump)

Field documentation[edit]

In detail, the fields of the interwiki database table are as follows:

• iw_prefix: choose a prefix, which is used for interwiki linking, e.g. "wikipedia" for linking to Wikipedia.

   Note: Prefixes must be all lower-case.

• iw_url: enter the project's URL, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1 for Wikipedia. Don't forget the $1 as it is replaced with the article's name you are linking to ([[Wikipedia:Main Page]] links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page).

   Note: If iw_url is a binary BLOB field (SVN version, but also occurs in version 1.11.0, bug?) this won't work directly. You have to enter it as binary. There are two possible solutions: 1. You save the url in a plain text file, then import it through phpmyadmin. 2. You can directly enter an SQL query.

• iw_local: if 1, your wiki will redirect even external links of the form iw_prefix:title, not only those from its own pages; you need this if you want to use the redirect functionality from outside your wiki or other wikis use your transwiki functions for nested transwiki links (like w:en:fr:Wikipédia:Accueil). See m:Help:Interwiki linking#Non-local interwikis.
• iw_trans: "transwiki transclusion" - set to 1 if you want to use pages from the other wiki as templates. You will also need to set $wgEnableScaryTranscluding = true in your LocalSettings.php
• iw_api: URL to the MediaWiki API, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php (optional).
• iw_wikiid: Database name of the wiki (If locally accessible). May be used (later?) for interwiki transclusions. (optional)

References[edit]

1. ↑ Is using extension:Interwikiextension:Interwiki, make sure to use version 2.1, which fixes a caching latency problem

Interwiki links to other languages[edit]

Interwiki links to other languages

If you have installed a Wiki family, you can link from an article in English to an article in German (if you have a German project, too). You can set up MediaWiki, to show those links in the sidebar, just below the toolbox.

In your filesystem, there is a subfolder of your MediaWiki installation, called "languages". Go there and have a look at "Names.php" as it contains a list of known languages and their prefixes. E.g. you want to add your German project, search "Names.php" for "Deutsch" and note the prefix "de".

If you know the "right" prefix, edit your database by adding a new line to table interwiki:

• iw_prefix: language-prefix (e.g. "de" for German), which is listed in "Names.php"
• iw_url: URL to your wiki-project (e.g. http://de.example.org/index.php/$1)
• iw_local: same as above "Adding More"
• iw_trans: same as above "Adding More"

Now, you can link an article to the same in other languages. Adding [[de:Hauptseite]] on your English Main_Page will create a link "Deutsch" below the toolbox, which leads to the Main_Page of the German wiki (Hauptseite).

Note, that this link is shown in Sidebar's section, only, and not inside of the article. If you want to create a link inside of the text, you have to add a colon previous to the prefix: [[:de:Hauptseite]] or set $wgInterwikiMagic to false.

Exporting the interwiki table from a wiki[edit]

The interwiki table can be queried through the API:Meta module using meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap.

The following JavaScript code can be used to generate the SQL INSERT statements to fill the interwiki table, when run inside the wiki where that info should be extracted, for example, injecting the code through the browser's developer tools or placing it inside Special:MyPage/<skinname>.js and previewing:

function ExtractInterwikiMapTable() {
	$.getJSON(wgScriptPath + '/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap&format=json', function(data) {
		var iw_prefix, iw_url, iw_local, iw_api, re_escape = /(')/g, result = '';
		for (var i = 0, iwm = data.query.interwikimap; i < iwm.length; i++) {
			iw_prefix = "'" + iwm[i].prefix.replace(re_escape, '\\$1') + "'";
			iw_url = "'" + iwm[i].url.replace(re_escape, '\\$1') + "'";
			iw_local = (typeof iwm[i].local == 'string') ? '1' : '0';
			iw_api = "'" + (iwm[i].iw_api || '').replace(re_escape, '\\$1') + "'";
			result += 'INSERT INTO interwiki (iw_prefix, iw_url, iw_local, iw_trans, iw_api) VALUES ('+iw_prefix+', '+iw_url+', '+iw_local+', 0, '+iw_api+');\n'
		}
		$('<textarea style="width:800px;height:400px;"/>').val(result).appendTo(document.body);
	});
}

$(ExtractInterwikiMapTable);

See also[edit]

• Help:LinksHelp:Links
• Extension:InterwikiExtension:Interwiki (produces Special:Interwiki)
• Manual:Guide to setting up interwiki linkingManual:Guide to setting up interwiki linking
• Manual:Interwiki tableManual:Interwiki table
• MetaWiki:Help:Interwiki linking
• Interwiki map of Mediawiki.org