Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects

To link sister projects using traditional inline text links see Wikipedia:InterWikimedia links.

Wikimedia sister projects are all the publicly available wikis operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, including the Wikipedia. This guideline covers Wikipedia's relations to the sister projects, including linking and copying content between Wikipedia article and a sister project.

Sister projects

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

Commons
Free media repository
MediaWiki
Wiki software development
Meta-Wiki
Wikimedia project coordination
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals
Wikidata
Free knowledge base
Wikinews
Free-content news
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations
Wikisource
Free-content library
Wikispecies
Directory of species
Wikiversity
Free learning tools
Wikivoyage
Free travel guide
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus

The above list of the current English language sister projects can be easily duplicated in any article using {{Wikipedia's sister projects}} template.

When to link

Wikipedia encourages links from Wikipedia articles to pages on sister projects when such links are likely to be useful to our readers, and interlingual crosslinking to articles on foreign-language editions of Wikipedia whenever such links are possible.

By far, the most common use of links to the non-Wikipedia sister projects is the use of images that are stored on the Wikimedia Commons site.

How to link

Editors link to pages on sister projects (other than the inter-language Wikipedias) in five ways:

by linking images and other files hosted by Wikicommons, such as File:Wind in the willows.jpg,
through inline links such as this link to wikisource:The Wind in the Willows (the pipe trick works: [[wikisource:The Wind in the Willows|''The Wind in the Willows'']] produces The Wind in the Willows),
through large graphical templates, such as {{Wikisource|The Wind in the Willows}}, as shown at the right,
through standard links directly to the URL, exactly like any other website, such as The Wind in the Willows, and
with templates that produce a formatted line for a bulleted list, such {{Wikisource-inline|The Wind in the Willows}}, which produces:

Works related to The Wind in the Willows at Wikisource

As with standard wikilinks to other Wikipedia articles, pages at sister projects are normally linked only once within an article.

Where to place links

The best place and the best format for a link to a page on a Wikimedia sister project depend on the situation. For example, if a word in the text might be unfamiliar to some readers, then an inline link to Wiktionary directs readers to the definition of the word. Links to sister projects on disambiguation pages frequently use large, graphical templates such as {{Sister project links}} at the top of the page.

In normal lists and articles, if there is no directly relevant section in the page, then the links are usually placed in the external links section (creating that section if using an external-links style link instead of a large, graphical template), or, if no such section exists and you are using a large, graphical template, then the links should be placed in the last section of the page, as described in Wikipedia:Layout. Sister links are not normally included in See also sections, which are reserved for links to pages within the English Wikipedia.

If placing sister project links in the external links section or last section results in a long sequence of right-aligned boxes hanging off the bottom of the article, use other ways of linking. Try changing the format to these links to the one-line external links style (two examples shown in the previous section). {{Sister project links}} can be used to unify all links in a single large graphical template. Alternatively, you can move the graphical templates up to improve the layout of the page.

Common interproject link targets have standardized templates that allow them to be easily distinguished from normal external links. These templates can be found at Category:Interwiki link templates.

Soft redirects from Wikipedia to a sister project

Sometimes an entry is more appropriate on Wiktionary than Wikipedia and can never be expanded beyond simple dictionary definition. Normally, such articles are copied to Wiktionary using transwiki process, and deleted from Wikipedia afterwards.

However, if the word or phrase is commonly wikified, it is quite likely that the deleted entry will be quickly re-created again by well-meaning users. The re-created article is likely to be another simple dictionary definition, just as inappropriate for Wikipedia as the original.

To avoid this, do not delete after transwiki'ing. One solution, as suggested by Wikipedia deletion policy, is to instead normally redirect the word to a relevant article within Wikipedia. For instance, Organize could redirect it to a well-developed Organization article via #REDIRECT [[Organization]].

If this is not possible, turn a Wikipedia page into a soft redirect to a sister project. This is done by replacing the page with either the {{softredirect}} template, or one of specialized templates (template {{wi}} is recommended in case of Wiktionary). These templates inform reader to look for information on the sister project, in case of this example provide link to wikt:Organize article. This has multiple benefits:

it brings the sister projects closer together,
it prevents future clean up issues.

Wikipedia does not have an article on "wikimedia sister projects", but its sister project Wiktionary does:

Read the Wiktionary entry "Organize"

You can also:

Search for Wikimedia sister projects in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

Start the Wikimedia sister projects article, using the Article Wizard if you wish, or add a request for it; but please remember that Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

This applies to other sister projects as well, not only to Wiktionary. Please keep in mind that only commonly wikified words should become soft redirects. We don't need a soft redirect for every possible word or phrase to be included in Wikipedia.

Templates

The Wikipedia:Template messages/Sister projects page lists templates that are designed to provide article-to-article linking between Wikipedia and its Wikimedia sister projects.

Linking between projects

Project	Long form	Shortcut
Wikipedia	`[[wikipedia:]]`	`[[w:]]`
Wiktionary	`[[wiktionary:]]`	`[[wikt:]]`
Wikinews	`[[wikinews:]]`	`[[n:]]`
Wikibooks	`[[wikibooks:]]`	`[[b:]`
Wikiquote	`[[wikiquote:]]`	`[[q:]]`
Wikisource	`[[wikisource:]]`	`[[s:]]`
Wikispecies	`[[wikispecies:]]`	`[[species:]]`
Wikiversity	`[[wikiversity:]]`	`[[v:]]`
Wikimedia Foundation	`[[wikimedia:]] [[foundation:]]`	`[[wmf:]]`
Wikimedia Commons	`[[commons:]]`
Wikimedia Meta-Wiki	`[[meta:]]`	`[[m:]]`
Wikimedia Incubator	`[[incubator:]]`
MediaWiki		`[[mw:]]`
Bugzilla	`[[mediazilla:]]`	`[[bugzilla:]]`

Unified login or Merged Account

Unified login is a mechanism which allows users to use a single login across the majority of the Wikimedia Foundation's sister projects. This allows users to maintain a consistent identity throughout Wikimedia, following a single sign-up. Other advantages of this mechanism include the removal of the threat that impersonation poses and the ability to visit many projects without having to go through the labors of logging in everywhere. Users can create a unified login by visiting Special:MergeAccount on a project where they already have an account, and following the prompts.

v t e Transwiki
Script
Meta	Import log
Wikibooks	Template (Cookbook) Category Import log Request import
Wikiquote	Template Category Import log
Wikisource	Template Category Import log
Wiktionary	Import log
Wikiversity	Template Category Import log Request import
Wikivoyage	Template Category Import log