Editing Wiki (section)

=== Linking to and naming pages ===

The syntax used to create internal hyperlinks varies between wiki implementations. Beginning with the WikiWikiWeb in 1995, most wikis used [[camel case]] to name pages,<ref>Bäckström, A., & Wändin, L. (2005). Spatial Hypertext Editing Tools for Wiki Web Systems.</ref> which is when words in a phrase are [[capital letter|capitalized]] and the spaces between them removed. In this system, the phrase "camel case" would be rendered as "CamelCase". In early wiki engines, when a page was displayed, any instance of a camel case phrase would be transformed into a link to another page named with the same phrase.

While this system made it easy to link to pages, it had the downside of requiring pages to be named in a form deviating from standard spelling, and titles of a single word required abnormally capitalizing one of the letters (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). Some wiki implementations attempt to improve the display of camel case page titles and links by reinserting spaces and possibly also reverting to lower case, but this simplistic method is not able to correctly present titles of mixed capitalization. For example, "[[Kingdom of France]]" as a page title would be written as "KingdomOfFrance", and displayed as "Kingdom Of France".

To avoid this problem, the syntax of wiki markup gained ''free links'', wherein a term in natural language could be wrapped in special characters to turn it into a link without modifying it. The concept was given the name in its first implementation, in [[UseModWiki]] in February 2001.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.usemod.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UseModWiki/OldVersions | title = UseModWiki/OldVersions | last = Adams | first = Clifford | date = 26 April 2001 | access-date = 25 July 2024}}</ref> In that implementation, link terms were wrapped in a double set of square brackets, for example <kbd><nowiki>[[Kingdom of France]]</nowiki></kbd>. This syntax was adopted by a number of later wiki engines.

It is typically possible for users of a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite the creation of those pages. Such links are usually differentiated visually in some fashion, such as being colored red instead of the default blue, which was the case in the original WikiWikiWeb, or by appearing as a question mark next to the linked words.