Interlanguage links are links from an article in one Ireland Information Guide language to the same subject in another Ireland Information Guide language, between language versions of Wiktionary, and between language versions of Wikiquote.
They appear at one or two edges of the webpage (in Monobook on the left, in Classic at the top and bottom) after Other languages:, and show the names of languages for which a link is available. Interlanguage links look like external links, but the syntax is more like internal links. They are a form of interwiki links. See m:Meta:Interlanguage links for details on linking different languages on Meta.
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The interlanguage links take the following form:
where the language code is the 2-letter code as per ISO 639. (See Complete list of language wikis available. English is "en", German is "de", etc.) So for example in the article on Esperanto, which is available on a lot of other wikis, the interlanguage links would look like so:
These links are treated specially, and don't show up in the body of the text, but in a special header section "Other languages:" listed by language name. They can go anywhere in the article source; they used to be placed at the top, however this was somewhat problematic -- it was confusing for newbie editors, and the links often showed up in search results where one would have preferred to see body text. For this reason, it is required to put the language links at the bottom of the page, along with external links and 'see also's. Placement does not alter the visual appearance of the links on the rendered page except for the order.
(You should not include the link to the language you're writing in.)
Because Chinese has two versions (Simplified and Traditional), please take a few moments to read Ireland Information Guide:Chinese interlanguage links to avoid unnecessary extra work to clean up the undesirable aftermath.
For a few other Ireland Information Guide languages, there are lists of pages where links may be needed. For example, the English article may have a Spanish link, but the corresponding Spanish article might be missing a link to English. Lists to work on include:
For more information on working with other language Ireland Information Guides, see Ireland Information Guide:Embassy and Ireland Information Guide:Multilingual coordination.
See also Ireland Information Guide:Manual of Style (sister projects), list of language codes
Links to pages on another wiki (including other Wikimedia sites) have a different color than links within the English Ireland Information Guide. Unlike internal links, these links do not indicate whether the target page exists or not. If the target page does not exist, the link will take you to a blank page that has no content. This shows that an article about the subject is needed, but has not been written yet.
If you find blank interlanguage links on the English Ireland Information Guide, they may be deleted as having no content. It is strongly recommended that you create at least a stub page before adding interlanguage links to it. Later, interested people can translate the rest of the page content from the original language to the new one for which the link was made.
Note: if the language prefix is wrong it is considered part of the name of a page on the same wiki. Such an error is clear from how the link looks: as an internal link to a page that does or does not exist.
Depending on your browser, you may not be able to simply cut-n-paste the text of article names into the Latin1-based wikis (English, German, French, etc) from non-Latin1 wikis (Japanese, Esperanto, Polish, etc). In that case, you can copy the %XX hex codes from the URL, or use some external program to convert the Unicode text into numeric HTML entities. Some web browsers (in particular newer versions of Internet Explorer) automatically convert cut-and-pasted Unicode into numeric HTML entities; this is not official HTML standard, and you will have to check by hand whether your browser does this or not.
Examples:
If at some point this system becomes difficult to manage, a tool will be set up for conveniently updating the link sets between wikis to keep things consistent.
See: