The original idea of InterWiki was to have one large distributed Wiki over the whole Internet. Today its 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 shortcuts are defined in two files:

• the <dokuwiki_conf>/interwiki.conf file.
  This is the default file, it contains a few predefined useful shortcuts (more can be found in http://usemod.com/intermap.txt). It is possible to modify this file, however this could result in your changes being overwritten when upgrading DokuWiki.
• the <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.

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

The format of the interwiki config file is:

<shortcut>      <url to wiki>

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 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:

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:

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.

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.

• Configuring DokuWiki