Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects Information & Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects Links at HealthHaven.com

This page documents an English Wikipedia style guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:SIS WP:SISP WP:SISTER WP:Sibling WP:MOSSIS

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

Commons
Free media repository

Wikinews
Free-content news

Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus

Wikiquote
Collection of quotations

Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals

Wikisource
Free-content library

Wikispecies
Directory of species

Wikiversity
Free learning materials and activities

Meta-Wiki
Wikimedia project coordination

The above list of the current English language sister projects can be easily duplicated in any article using {{WikipediaSister}} 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

See also: Help:Interlanguage links

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

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Wind in the Willows

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,
through large graphical templates, as shown at the right, and
with templates that produce a formatted line for a bulleted lists, 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.

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. Links to sister projects on disambiguation pages frequently use large, graphical templates such as {{Sisterlinks}} at the top of the page.

If there is no directly relevant section in the page, then they are usually placed in the external links section, or, if no such section exists, 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, they may be moved up to improve the layout.

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 encyclopedia article for Wikimedia sister projects (search results).
You may want to read Wiktionary's entry on "Organize" instead.

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

Main article: Wikipedia:Template messages/Sister projects

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

Main article: Wikipedia:InterWikimedia links

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:]]`

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