MechaBay:Tutorial (Wiki links)
It is important to link MechaBay articles together so that readers can find more information about certain topics that they come across while browsing MechaBay.
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When to link
You can refer to MechaBay articles for examples on how to link. If you are trying to decide whether to make a link or not, ask yourself if the link would be useful to you if you were reading the article. It is a general practice to link the first instance of a term in an article so that users who are unfamiliar with it can learn more about it by reading the linked article.
How to link
A link to another page in MechaBay can be made with a wiki link. To make a wiki link, put the title of the article in double square brackets.
- [[MechaBay]] gives you MechaBay
You can display a text that is a different from the title of the target page. Add a pipe (|) divider after the page title, followed by the alternative name.
- [[Main Page|Home of MechaBay]] gives you Home of MechaBay
Check to make sure that the links are pointing to the correct article, especially when there are articles with similar titles.
Linking dates
Real world dates
It may seem pointless to link dates. However, linking dates will enable the dates to be automatically displayed according to a user's preferred date display format.
If you link the date: [[February 01]], [[2009]]
MechaBay will display it in one of the following formats:
- February 01, 2009
- 01 February 2009
- 2009 February 01
- 2009-02-01
This feature would only work for logged in users.
In-universe dates
As MechaBay covers different mecha universes, there would be different in-universe date formats. For in-universe dates, link the year to the target timeline page.
For example:
- [[Cosmic Era|C.E.]] 71 — for Cosmic Era from the Gundam franchise
- [[Universal Century|U.C.]] 0079 — for Universal Century from the Gundam franchise
- 2017 [[Acension Throne Britannia|a.t.b.]] — for Acension Throne Britannia of the Code Geass universe
Categories
All articles should be add articles to at least one category. Categories help readers to find articles on a related topic. Categories are usually placed at the end of an article.
This is the format to use: [[Category:Category name]]
For example: [[Category:MechaBay help]]
To link to a category page in your article, using the above format will not make the link show up. You will need to put a colon (:) at the beginning of the Category tag.
This is the format to use for linking a category: [[:Category:Category name]]
For example,
- [[:Category:MechaBay help]]
would give
It is a good practice to check the existing categories and check what they are used for before adding an article. It is useful to add articles to a category but adding them to the wrong category would just cause confusion.
Practice
Play around in the sandbox and try out the new tricks you have picked up from this lesson.
The next lesson is Using external links.
