Help:Self link

This page is about pages that link to themselves. For the guideline on articles referring to Wikipedia itself, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid § Writing about Wikipedia itself.

A self link is the use of a link code with the page itself as target. It does not produce an actual link, but a non-clickable bold text (the "self-link format"). However, with the preference setting "Link underlining", this text is underlined. This can be suppressed putting the following in your relevant personal css page:

.mw-selflink { text-decoration: none !important; }

Live examples (hence depending on your settings):

• [[Help:Self link]] → Help:Self link
• [[Help:Self link]]s → Help:Self links
• [[Help:Self link|piped self link]] → piped self link

Self links are usually undesirable, except for:

• Within navigation templates, where the self-link-produced boldface helps locate the article within the template
• Self-links to a section, such as this link, which links to the section below.

Self-link to a section

A link to a section of the same article, even from the same section, does not produce bold text and works as a normal link. For example:

[[Help:Self link#Self-link to a section]] → Help:Self link#Self-link to a section

Such links should usually be written without the page name:

[[#Self-link to a section]] → #Self-link to a section

because this method does not cause the page to reload if the reader initially arrived at the page via a redirect, and is thus more efficient. A useful application is links from article leads or overview sections to detail sections buried deeper in the same article. An automatically generated table of contents has links to sections on the page.

Suppression of self-links

In some cases, such as with templates that are not navigation templates, and that are transcluded into several pages, self-links can be actively suppressed by enclosing the link within the template {{No self link}}.

Indirect self links

An indirect self link is a link to a page that redirects back. In this case, the self-link feature does not work, even though the feature would be equally useful. This is demonstrated here:

• [[Self link]] → Self link

When the prefix for the project itself is added (interwiki link style, but again linking to the page itself) the self-link feature does work, if the link has the same name as the ultimate target apart from the prefix. This is demonstrated here:

• [[w:Help:Self link]] → w:Help:Self link
• [[en:Help:Self link]] → en:Help:Self link

Related changes feature

A self link for use with the "Related changes" feature only works if the link is to an existing or non-existing section. If it cannot be made useful as a link to a section, use a piped link with a blank space as label, e.g. [[Wikipedia:Self link#x| ]], showing up as " ".

See also

• Navigation template
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid