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Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects

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To link sister projects using traditional inline text links, see Help:Interwikimedia links.

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

Sister projects

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

The above list of the current English language sister projects can be easily duplicated using the {{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 (see Wikipedia:Wikimedia Commons).

How to link

Links to sister projects are made in several ways:

Where to place links

Sister project links should generally appear in the "External links" section. Two exceptions are links to Wiktionary and Wikisource that may be linked inline (e.g. to an unusual word or the text of a document being discussed).

Some appropriate material from Wikimedia Commons may also be linked within the main body of an article. See Embedding Commons' media in Wikipedia articles.

A box-type template can result in excessive white space when the section is laid out in columns.

Most box-type templates such as {{Commons}} shown at right should be put at the beginning of the last section of the article (which is usually, but not necessarily, the "External links" section) so that boxes will appear next to, rather than below, the list items.[1] Do not make a section whose sole content is box-type templates. Many box links can be unified to one by using {{Sister project links}} or {{Subject bar}}.

Sometimes box-type templates are not aesthetically pleasing, either because there are no external links except sister project ones, or because they result in an odd layout, such as a long sequence of right-aligned boxes hanging off the bottom of the article or excessive white space when the section is laid out in columns. In such cases, consider using "inline" templates, such as {{Commons-inline}}, in the "External links" section, so that links to sister projects appear as list items, like this:

As with standard links to other Wikipedia articles, sister project links are normally made only once within an article.

Notes

  1. ^ There are exceptions to this general rule for example {{Wiktionary}} often appears near the top of disambiguation pages and {{wikisource}} templates sometimes appear to the right of a TOC if for example an article is about a treaty to which Wikisource has the original text.

Soft redirects from Wikipedia to a sister project

Sometimes an entry is more appropriate on Wiktionary than Wikipedia and can never be expanded beyond a simple dictionary definition. Normally, such articles are copied to Wiktionary using the 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 the case of Wiktionary). These templates inform readers of information on the sister project: in the case of this example a link would be provided to the wikt:Organize article. This has multiple benefits:

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

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.

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:]]
Wikivoyage [[wikivoyage:]] [[voy:]]
Wikimedia Foundation [[wikimedia:]]
[[foundation:]]
[[wmf:]]
Wikimedia Commons [[commons:]] [[c:]]
Wikidata [[wikidata:]] [[d:]]
Meta-Wiki [[meta:]] [[m:]]
Wikimedia Incubator [[incubator:]]
MediaWiki [[mediawikiwiki:]] [[mw:]]
Phabricator [[phabricator:]] [[phab:]]

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.

See also