The original idea of InterWiki was to have one large distributed Wiki over the whole Internet. Today it's more of an easy way to link from one wiki to another by having some simple link syntax to accomplish so.

In DokuWiki this is done by prefixing Wiki pagenames with a shortcut separated by a > character.

Examples:

Here's an example of how to access an arbitrary file in DokuWiki's data/media directory by clicking on an image. It's useful for videos and PDF files.

[[this>lib/exe/fetch.php?media=video.ogg|{{image.png?300}}]]

Interwiki substitution for external images is also available.

{{ phpfn>images/php.gif?96}}

InterWiki shortcuts are defined in two files:

• Default included links are in <dokuwiki_conf>/interwiki.conf file. (more can be found in http://usemod.com/intermap.txt). Modifications of this file are overwritten on a wiki upgrade.
• Local modifications in <dokuwiki_conf>/interwiki.local.conf file.
  This is the file to add your own interwiki links. This will prevent the links from being overwritten on an update.

Alternatively, instead of editing the *.conf files directly, you can install and use the Configuration File Manager.

The interwiki shortcut has to be in lowercase and follow the pagename rules.

The format of the interwiki config file is:

conf/interwiki.local.conf

<shortcut>   <url to wiki>

Modify existing interwiki links, by reusing the shortcut:

conf/interwiki.local.conf

wp           https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/{NAME}

Or disable by mentioning no link

conf/interwiki.local.conf

wpmeta
paypal   # or use a comment to explain why it is disabled

The shortcut is the one you will be able to use in the link later. In the URL you can use some placeholders to be more flexible in linking. If no placeholder is given the URL-encoded wikiname will be appended to the URL. These placeholders are available:

The last 5 parameters are useful when creating interwikilinks to cachesystems.

For configuration changes to take effect on the pages, the cache must be purged.

For example cached links with the old, not longer working, Coral Content Distribution Network could be used by a coral shortcut, defined using a couple of placeholders:

conf/interwiki.local.conf

coral http://{HOST}.{PORT}.nyud.net:8090{PATH}?{QUERY}

For example, Ubuntu's wiki uses namespaces and pagenames like this LaptopTestingTeam/ToshibaPortegeM700 and without using {NAME} as a placeholder in your interwiki.local.conf file, you'll get a “Not Found” error on their wiki, because it'll interpret the forward slash as a %2F ; so what you can do is add this line to your interwiki.local.conf:

conf/interwiki.local.conf

ubuntu   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/{NAME}

and now create your link to it like this:

[[ubuntu>LaptopTestingTeam/ToshibaPortegeM700|Ubuntu on Toshiba Portege M700 Tablet]]

If the wikiname will already include encoded characters (ex: %26 for &) use {PATH} in your interwiki.local.conf definition.

To refer to certain namespaces within you own wiki:¹⁾

conf/interwiki.local.conf

<shortcut>      <dokuwiki_root>:ns:..:

For example:

conf/interwiki.local.conf

enlib     doku.php?id=:en:lib:

would address pages in the namespace :en:lib:pagename if using the link syntax [[enlib>pagename]].

Interwiki icons should have a size of 16×16 pixels, be in PNG or GIF format, and be named after the shortcut.

• <dokuwiki_root>/lib/images/interwiki
  The directory to place the image files in.

You should also purge cached PNG and GIF images as well as the CSS Files if you have the default image instead of the one you uploaded.

rm -rf <dokuwiki_data>/data/cache/*/*.{gif,png,css}

It may actually be enough to invalidate the CSS caching by re-saving in the config manager ('re-saving' means pressing the save button of config manager without any changes of config options).

If you want to disable all or some kind of link icons, refer to disabling link icons.

Because it is reserved to mark a comment line, a hash (#) needs to be escaped by a backslash (\#).

e.g. if you are using the name of your interwiki in the fragment part of your URL, you need to escape it.

Example:

• Configuration

  conf/interwiki.local.conf

  postconf  http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html\#{NAME}

• Usage

  [[postconf>smtpd_tls_received_header]]

• Additional InterWiki Shortcuts
• You can install and use the Configuration File Manager for editing via admin interface of the wiki
• Configuring DokuWiki