Help:Pipe 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 H:PT WP:PIPETRICK

The pipe trick uses the pipe character ("|") to save typing the label of a piped link for several kinds of wiki links. This can avoid potentially making an error while typing the label.

When the last character of a link is the pipe character, the pipe trick will automatically generate the text that displays for that link. Its processing removes the parenthesized part of the link title, handles commas in the title, and removes namespace prefixes. The described processing happens at the point of saving the page data, and the generated text is saved with the rest of the page's wiki markup – thus, it is merely an aid to editing.

An even better way to save keystrokes that does not need any additional characters is by simply attaching text to the link, as in "[[train]]s".

The pipe trick does not work in edit summaries, within <ref> tags, or with links to sections. See § Where it doesn't work below.