Help:Colon trick

The colon trick is a method of creating a link to a category, image or interwiki link. It does this 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://.

By adding a colon just inside the opening double square brackets of the link, it changes the way MediaWiki software normally works. It will appear as a regular wikilink.

Examples

 * would list this page in Category Help but  will produce a link to Category:Help
 * would display an image but  will produce a link to File:App icon-1.png
 * will create an interlanguage link but  will produce an interwiki link to ?|:pt:Internet (in the Portuguese Wikipedia)
 * will produce an (invalid) external link wrapped in brackets (i.e. ?|//Hus), but  will produce a link to ?|://Hus.

With templates
A colon can also be used to transclude a page in mainspace, rather than template namespace. For example, &#123;{?|Template:The Beatles}&#125; will transclude ?|Template:The Beatles, but   will transclude the mainspace article ?|The Beatles. This is useful when the mainspace article has been specially formatted to be transcluded in other articles, by using &lt;noinclude&gt; or &lt;includeonly&gt; tags to indicate the portion that should be included when the article is transcluded. ?|Welcome vs Welcome

Related pages

 * Help:Magic words
 * Help:Pipe trick