TechInfoDepot:Wikimedia sister projects

Wikimedia sister projects are all the publicly available wikis operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, including TechInfoDepot. This guideline covers TechInfoDepot's relations to the sister projects, including linking and copying content between TechInfoDepot article and a sister project.

Sister projects
The above list of the current English language sister projects can be easily duplicated using the TechInfoDepot's sister projects template.

When to link
TechInfoDepot encourages links from TechInfoDepot articles to pages on sister projects when such links are likely to be useful to our readers, and interlingual crosslinking to articles on foreign-language editions of TechInfoDepot whenever such links are possible.

By far, the most common use of links to the non-TechInfoDepot sister projects is the use of images that are stored on the Wikimedia Commons site (see TechInfoDepot:Wikimedia Commons).

How to link
Links to sister projects are made in several ways:
 * by linking images and other files hosted by Commons. See TechInfoDepot:Picture tutorial for more.
 * through inline links such as this link to The Wind in the Willows.
 * through templates, which may produce either larger boxes or simpler one-line links. See the next section for how and where to place them. Templates are found in TechInfoDepot:Template messages/Sister projects and Category:Interwiki link templates.
 * through standard links directly to the URL, exactly like any other website, such as The Wind in the Willows

Where to place links
Sister project links should generally appear in the "External links" section, not under See also. Two exceptions are Wiktionary and Wikisource links that may even be linked inline, like the last word "inline", i.e. as the text of a document that might not be familiar to all readers.



More precisely, box-type templates such as shown at right have to be put at the beginning of the last section of the article (which is not necessarily the "External links" section) so that boxes will appear next to, rather than below, the list items. Do not make a section whose sole content is box-type templates. Many box links can be unified to one by using Sister project links.

Sometimes box-type templates are not good. It's because either they result in a long sequence of right-aligned boxes hanging off the bottom of the article (including the opposite case where the section is layouted in columns), or there isn't any external links except sister project ones. In such cases, consider using "inline" templates, such as Commons-inline in the "External link" section, so that links to sister projects appear as list items, like this:

As with standard links to other TechInfoDepot articles, same sister project links are normally made only once within an article.

Soft redirects from TechInfoDepot to a sister project
Sometimes an entry is more appropriate on Wiktionary than TechInfoDepot and can never be expanded beyond simple dictionary definition. Normally, such articles are copied to Wiktionary using transwiki process, and deleted from TechInfoDepot afterwards.

However, if the word or phrase is commonly wikified, it is quite likely that the deleted entry will be quickly re-created again by well-meaning users. The re-created article is likely to be another simple dictionary definition, just as inappropriate for TechInfoDepot as the original.

To avoid this, do not delete after transwiki'ing. One solution, as suggested by TechInfoDepot deletion policy, is to instead normally redirect the word to a relevant article within TechInfoDepot. For instance, Organize could redirect it to a well-developed Organization article via.

If this is not possible, turn a TechInfoDepot page into a soft redirect to a sister project. This is done by replacing the page with either the softredirect template, or one of specialized templates (template wi is recommended in case of Wiktionary). These templates inform reader to look for information on the sister project, in case of this example provide link to Organize article. This has multiple benefits:


 * 1) it brings the sister projects closer together,
 * 2) it prevents future clean up issues.

This applies to other sister projects as well, not only to Wiktionary. Please keep in mind that only commonly wikified words should become soft redirects. We don't need a soft redirect for every possible word or phrase to be included in TechInfoDepot.

Unified login or Merged Account
Unified login is a mechanism which allows users to use a single login across the majority of the Wikimedia Foundation's sister projects. This allows users to maintain a consistent identity throughout Wikimedia, following a single sign-up. Other advantages of this mechanism include the removal of the threat that impersonation poses and the ability to visit many projects without having to go through the labors of logging in everywhere. Users can create a unified login by visiting Special:MergeAccount on a project where they already have an account, and following the prompts.