Help:Colon trick

This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus.

Shortcuts WP:COLON WP:COLONTRICK H::

The colon trick is a method of providing a link to a category, image or interwiki link without adding the page to the category, displaying the image or adding the interwiki link to the interlanguage links. It also allows for linking to pages with titles beginning with a recognized external link prefix, such as http:// or //Hus.

By adding a colon just inside the opening double square brackets of the link, the default behaviour of the MediaWiki software will be bypassed. It will appear as a conventional wikilink.