Transformers Wiki:Power User

Pipe Magic
Think you know all about creating links in Wikipedia? To link to Springer, you type Springer.

And if you want the link to say something else, you just insert a pipe (|) character; a rugged Han Solo type. a rugged Han Solo type. Since many of the articles on the wiki have an ugly (G1) continuity disambig after their name, manually set a link's appearance is important !

That one pipe trick can do everything you need... if you feel like setting every link by hand, and its a pain to read while editing. MediaWiki has several automated functions that makes links easier to deal with.

1. A Capital Idea
 * Wikipedia capitalizes the first letter of very article- even if you link to it lowercase. In the sentence "Carnivac hates human food." you can link to the Human article with the lowercase human without resorting to human.

2. Breathing Room
 * Mediawiki shaves off any spaces before the pipe (|) character, so put one in! It'll make your links much easier to read while editing. a rugged Han Solo type

3. All Life is Suffixing
 * MediaWiki assumes you want any text immediately after the end brackets (]]) to be part of the link. So instead of humans, you can just type human s, and it makes a link like this: humans.
 * Sadly, this does not work with apostrophes, which is why you run into a lot of links such as "Buster Witwicky's waiflike sexuality" where the possessive "'s" are not part of the link. We've decided it's usually not worth the effort of setting those manually.

4. Pipe to Nowhere
 * Almost all Transformer characters have a disambiguation suffix after their name because the name is used by multiple characters; Prowl (G1), Prowl (BW), Prowl (Animated), etc.
 * If you insert a pipe (|) with no replacement text (not even a space) MediaWiki removes the portion in parentheses from the displayed link. Prowl (G1) yields Prowl.  This will make your life much easier.
 * This same trick also removes 'namespace' from the front of a link-- such as when to a Wikipedia article. Las Vegas gives the friendlier-looking Las Vegas without having to type replacement text.

5. Disambigs Serve a Purpose
 * We spend a lot of time hiding those (G1)'s and (BW)'s because they disrupt the flow text while reading. However sometimes it's better to leave them visible, such as in in lists— especially if the article spans multiple continuities.
 * It's not a tech-tip, just something to keep in mind.