Pin Eight:Manual of Style/Links

There are three ways to make a hyperlink to another document from a page on Pin Eight wiki.

Internal links
Links within this wiki work the same way as on any other MediaWiki site; see Help:Links on MediaWiki.org. These ordinarily appear in a darker shade of blue than other links, and links to a nonexistent page appear red.

The detailed syntax is the same as that of interwiki links (below), without the  part. For example:  produces Pin Eight:Scope, and   produces specialization. Exceptions are the  and   namespaces, which need a leading colon to suppress the transclusion behavior: links to this file description page instead of transcluding the image, and  points to a list of articles instead of adding the article to the list.

Interwiki links
MediaWiki software supports interwiki links as a shortcut to make links to documents on select other wikis and even occasionally non-wiki sites that use standard identifiers for documents. These have up to six parts, taking this form: displayedtext
 * prefix : The site's interwiki prefix, as listed at Special:Interwiki.
 * namespace : For MediaWiki sites, the namespace. Optional; omit this (and the following colon) for pages in the main namespace or for non-MediaWiki sites.
 * pagetitle : The title or other identifier of the page. Spaces will be converted to underscores, and code points above ASCII will be percent-encoded in UTF-8.
 * disambig : MediaWiki sites may have multiple pages with the same title except for a disambiguator in parentheses at the end of the page title. Leave this out for non-MediaWiki sites.
 * fragment : A URL fragment identifier, such as the title of an article section. Spaces are likewise converted to underscores, and some kinds of punctuation are converted using a variant of percent encoding.
 * displayedtext : The text following the pipe character (the vertical bar  made with shift-backslash) is displayed in the link. A blank displayed text, called a "pipe trick", will automatically be replaced with the pagetitle when you save an edit, except in footnotes. If there is no pipe at all, the entire link will be displayed. Including displayed text is RECOMMENDED if the target site's pagetitles are not human-readable, such as YouTube video IDs. The displayed text SHOULD follow least astonishment; otherwise, you create a sinkhole or "Easter egg" link that confuses readers.

Here is a selection of prefixes for MediaWiki sites, which support namespace and disambig components with pagetitles:

Some non-MediaWiki sites are available as well:

Like any other external link, interwiki links may eventually fail to resolve due to reorganization of the target site's URL scheme. Pages can be edited to fix link rot, but links in edit summaries in their revision histories will remain broken.

HTTPS
In general, if a website has both cleartext HTTP and HTTPS versions, prefer the HTTPS version. This protects readers by preventing an ISP from intercepting a connection and inserting advertisements or other malware, as Comcast has been caught doing in 2017.

As of July 2018, Wikia was the top non-HTTPS domain in the United States (other than URL shorteners).