TechInfoDepot:Piped link

A piped link is a link where the hyperlinked (underlined, clickable) text displayed on a TechInfoDepot page is different from the title of the page to which the text links. For example,  displays as  station, but links to the Train station wiki page.

Use
Piped links are useful for preserving the grammatical structure and flow of a sentence when:
 * 1) the wording of the exact link title does not fit in context, or
 * 2) there are multiple meanings of the word (see "Mercury" example on the Disambiguation page).

To create the pipe ("|") character (also known as a vertical bar), you may press (SHIFT + BACKSLASH) on English-layout keyboards. On Spanish keyboards the pipe character can be obtained by pressing (AltGr+1). More simply, note that the pipe character is the third character that appears in the "wiki markup" section of symbols at the bottom of the symbol page that appears in "edit this page" mode. Clicking on the pipe symbol there inserts it at the cursor spot, just as happens for any symbol chosen from this page. For full details on how to use this feature, see Help:Piped link.

There is disagreement about whether it is appropriate to pipe year numbers to "year-in-x" articles (such as 2006 ). According to the TechInfoDepot Manual of Style:


 * Another possibility is to link to a more specific article about that year, for example 2006, although some people find this unintuitive because the link leads to an unexpected destination.

Piped year links should not be used when the date is a full date, including the day and the month, because it stops readers' date preferences working. For example, do not write 5 August 2006 or August 5, 2006.

When not to use
First of all, keep links as simple as possible:


 * Avoid making links longer than necessary: write " president George Washington ", not " president George Washington ".
 * It is generally not good practice to pipe links simply to avoid redirects. The number of links to a redirect page can be a useful gauge of when it would be helpful to spin off a subtopic of an article into its own page. See also: WP:NOTBROKEN.
 * Given the option to pipe a link or to "blend" an affix, preferred style is to use a blended affix. Write simply Public transportation instead of complicated Public transportation . Both display identically as Public transportation.
 * Never use piped links to convert first letter to lower case: write simply public transport instead of complicated public transport . Both display identically as public transport.

Intuitiveness
Keep piped links as intuitive as possible. Do not use piped links to create "easter egg links", that require the reader to follow them before understanding what's going on. Also remember there are people who print the articles. For example, do not write this:
 * ...and by mid-century the puns and sexual humor were (with only a few exceptions ) back in to stay.

The readers will not see the hidden reference to Thomas Bowdler unless they click or hover over the piped exceptions link. In a print version, there is no link to select, and the reference is lost. Instead, reference the article explicitly:
 * ...and by mid-century the puns and sexual humor were (with only a few exceptions, such as Thomas Bowdler ) back in to stay.

Similarly, instead of:
 * After an earlier disaster...

consider:
 * After an earlier disaster, the Bombay Explosion (1944), ...

It will occasionally be useful to link to a fuller explanation of a phrase; when this is done, link the phrase, not a single word.

If Pontiac's War is defined as having been
 * a war launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of elements of Native American tribes,

and there is no space for further explanation in that context (this is a quote from the lead of the article), then some readers will value a link to a description of the confederation. This should not be linked from the word confederation; the link in the following phrase:
 * a war launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of elements of Native American tribes

looks like a link to the article Confederation. At a minimum, link something that wouldn't be the title of an article under our article title conventions:
 * a war launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of elements of Native American tribes''.

Further, it is inappropriate to contain veiled and uncited interpretations of fiction through piped links, as in this excerpt from the The Iron Dream article, which contained over 30 interpretations hidden in links:
 * The pure and strong young "Trueman" (so named for the lack of mutations in his DNA) Feric Jaggar returns from the outlands of Borgravia where his family was exiled by the treaty of Karmak with the surrounding mutant states to his ancestral land of Helder ("the High Republic of Heldon"; founded on the principles of killing mutants and keeping humanity pure), only to find its rigor slackened and corrupted by the "Universalists", pawns of the sinister Dominator country Zind, which seeks to corrupt Helder's pure human gene pool into the mutant diversity that rules the rest of the world.

Such interpretation, if properly sourced, should be placed in its own section, and citations provided. If the interpretation is purely that of the editor, it is original research and should be moved someplace else entirely.

Categories
In the case of a category link, a piped link serves to sort the article alphabetically within the category. For example, to place Albert Einstein in Category:Physicists, you can link the article to, and the category will then alphabetize him under Einstein rather than Albert.

Templates
The pipe character is also used when supplying parameters to templates; this is not the same thing as a piped link.