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He married a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu girl Sangeetha on 25th August 1999. They have two children, Jason Sanjay, born on August 26, 2000 in London.[3]; and Divya Saasha born on September 9, 2005 in Chennai
He married a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu girl Sangeetha on 25th August 1999. They have two children, Jason Sanjay, born on August 26, 2000 in London.[3]; and Divya Saasha born on September 9, 2005 in Chennai


==Readability==
Shortcuts are often linked on talk pages without any [[WP:PIPE|piped]] text, although for the general reader this type of shortcut can decrease readability. Some editors are familiar with the bulk of Wikipedia's [[WP:PRJ|project namespace]] shortcuts, recognizing what they stand for on sight. While shortcuts can help with linking, it is best not to use them as a title when referring to a page. For example, the link ''[[WP:SHC|shortcuts]]'' uses a shortcut to link but gives readers an idea of the target, while quoting ''[[WP:SHC]]'' is unhelpful to those unfamiliar with the page. One should be mindful of the intended audience, and when quoting a page one should consider using its proper title.


A proposed method to increase readability is [[Wikipedia:full meta links|using templates producing full meta links]]. Individually a registered user can use [[WP:POPUPS|navigation popups]], a JavaScript tool.


==Adding shortcut link boxes==
==Adding shortcut link boxes==

Revision as of 08:23, 15 September 2007

Shortcuts in Wikipedia are a specialized type of redirection page that can be used to get to a Wikipedia project reference page more quickly. Lists of available Wikipedia shortcuts can be found at WP:WP = Wikipedia:List of shortcuts, WP:WPR = Wikipedia:Project shortcuts, and WT:WT = Wikipedia:Shortcuts to talk pages.

Procedures


Example: #REDIRECT [[Pagename]] {{R from shortcut}}.

Vijay was born on June 22 to S.A. Chandrasekhar and Shoba Chandrasekhar. He had a sister named Vidhya who died when she was just two.[1] Vijay studied Visual Communications at Loyola College, but dropped out to pursue an acting career.[2]He is interestingly also a classmate of Surya Sivakumar , Yuvan Shankar Raja,Karthik Raja , Jeevan, and Vishnuvardhan

He married a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu girl Sangeetha on 25th August 1999. They have two children, Jason Sanjay, born on August 26, 2000 in London.[3]; and Divya Saasha born on September 9, 2005 in Chennai


A shortcut link box can be added to a page by placing {{Shortcut|[[WP:<x>]]}} at the top of the text while editing. A note from the "shortcut template" page:

Please do not use this template on other templates, e.g. to state that the shortcut to Template:Foo is in fact {{Foo}}. There's no need to state the obvious like that, each template uses its own name as a shortcut, by default.

Guidelines with shortcuts pointing to them typically use {{guideline|[[WP:<x>]]}} instead of {{Shortcut}}, for an example see above. Another example is {{Style-guideline|[[WP:<x>]]}}, see also Wikipedia header templates.

How to create a shortcut

For an existing page like Wikipedia:Template Standardisation create the desired new WP:TS page with a single line: (example, this shortcut already exists)

#REDIRECT [[Wikipedia:Template Standardisation]] {{R from shortcut}}

Many shortcuts are acronyms, others are abbreviations, quite a lot are simply WP:BAD, but technically they are redirections.

Changing shortcuts

Technically that's easy, click on the shortcut wherever it is, on the page it leads to (a shortcut is a redirect) click on the "redirected from" link (forcing &redirect=no), edit the target #REDIRECT [[Wikipedia:Whatever]], then add {{R from shortcut}} if that expression doesn't already appear. But there are some potential traps and pitfalls:

  1. If the shortcut is already listed on Wikipedia:List of shortcuts or a similar list like Wikipedia:Shortcuts to talk pages, please update that entry showing the new target page.
  2. If the old target page mentions its shortcut, then that also should be updated, typically in {{Shortcut}} or similar Wikipedia header templates.
  3. Above all check the shortcut backlinks with "what links here"; changing a shortcut used elsewhere can be highly disruptive.
  4. If it has no backlink folks might still use it directly with search forms, if you're not 100% sure that the old target is unused; so ask about it on the shortcut's talk page.
  5. For controversial cases, go to Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion.

List of shortcuts

An incomplete list of shortcuts can be found at Wikipedia:List of shortcuts, and as expected this page has itself various shortcuts like WP:WP, WP:CUTS, or just [[WP:]].

Other shortcuts for shortcut lists are WP:WPR for Wikipedia:Project shortcuts and WT:WT for Wikipedia:Shortcuts to talk pages. Obviously many shortcuts are (ab)used to make a WP:POINT and best described by WP:WOTTA.

On Meta shortcuts start with WM:, the list is at m:WM:WM. As shown, links to shortcuts on other projects work as expected, but redirects (incl. shortcuts) to pages on other projects won't work - this former feature was abused and hence it has been disabled.

Use special pages to find uncategorized or unlisted pages starting with a given prefix, e.g. Special:Prefixindex/CAT: for some category shortcuts.

List of prefixes

Commonly used pseudo-namespaces include:

WP: Wikipedia: (in rare cases, User:)
WT: Wikipedia talk:
MOS: Wikipedia:Manual of Style
CAT: Category:
P: Portal:

The following pseudo-namespaces are less commonly used, for a variety of reasons:

Wp: Wikipedia:
Wt: Wikipedia talk:
WPP: Wikipedia:WikiProject
MoS: Wikipedia:Manual of Style
Mos: Wikipedia:Manual of Style
Special talk: Wikipedia talk:Special
Cat: Category:
C: Category:
T: Template: or Template talk:

See also