Help:Redlinks: Difference between revisions

A redlink (or red link) in a wiki is a link to an article which has not yet been created. A redlink appears whenever double square brackets - [[ ]] - are placed around a word or phrase that the wiki doesn't yet have a page for.

This is one of the key innovations that makes a wiki successful. A wiki shows the reader that a page could be created, but hasn't yet been created, and gives a one-click path to start contributing. Good red links help the wiki grow, and encourage new contributors to participate. Make redlinks that would make useful and relevant articles, and as far as you can, choose obvious names for a topic, and follow Appropedia:Naming conventions. (Don't worry too much about naming, but it's basically all lower case except for proper nouns. First letter is case insensitive.)

A redlink is a way of saying that an article should be created for the topic because it is important and would be useful, and acceptable (important for the nervous first-time contributor).

When you see a redlink on Appropedia, consider it an invitation to create the article. Just click the link, and start typing, or enter information which you have the right to share:

• public domain
• your own work
• works under a suitable Creative Commons license. There are only two compatible with Appropedia: CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.

Rather than using red links in lists, disambiguation pages or templates as an article creation guide, it is usually best to write articles, and use Special:WantedPages or community discussion/project pages to discuss, if necessary. There are exceptions to this, especially when running focused projects (e.g. Appropedia:Content Initiatives) and inviting contributions from people who are new to wikis.

Wanted pages - help by creating these pages!

At Special:WantedPages you can see all the redlinks on Appropedia, starting with the most common. The first thing to check is whether there is an existing link that the pagename should point to - if so, you can create a redirect:

#REDIRECT [[name of the target page]]

If you are using the basic edit option (non rich text), the easy way is to click the "#R" button. (The "REDIRECT" is not case sensitive.)

Create redlinks

Another project on Appropedia is creating redlinks. User:ChriswaterguyBot is used to create wikilinks, and some of these will be redlinks.

You can also create redlinks, by linking any term that definitely should have a page on Appropedia. If it turns out to be a redlink, you might check whether there's another page it can redirect to.

Displaying "redlinks"

Maybe you don't like these kind of links being displayed as red. Go to Special:Preferences >> The "Misc" (miscellaneous) preferences allow several options for the appearance of links.

See also

• Help:Creating a page

Interwiki links

• Wikipedia:Project:Red link