The mention system exists to make your world building life on World Anvil a whole lot easier; it links your articles together so your readers will stay on your world for all eternity.
If you have started an article and you mention something that you already have an article for then the only thing you have to do is to mention it and it will appear as a link. Even if you don't have an existing article you can still mention it and it will also appear in your
to-do-list.
Mentioning an existing article
To mention an article that you have already created, maybe with the purple button, you type an
@ and add the first letters of the name of the article or the first letters of the article type. Then you click the button of the article you want to link to and it will automatically appear in the editor.
If you have several articles with the same name but they are different templates you can search for them to, like this @person
This is how the link will look on the front end, on the article in your world-
and this is how it looks on the backend, while you edit the article.
Mentioning a non-existing article
If you want to mention an article you don't want to
create yet you can also type an
@ ...but this time you need to type everything out by yourself.
Like this
Testy
-You write the name of the article and after that, you type the name of the template within these ( ).
The article will also appear in the to-do list after you have saved it.
These are the templates: Character (character) or (person), Conflict (militaryConflict) or (conflict), Condition (condition), Document (document), Ethnicity (ethnicity), Formation (formation),Geographic location (location), Generic article (article), Item (item), Language (language), Law (law), Settlement (settlement), Building/Location (landmark), Material (material), Myth / Legend (myth) or (legend) or (prophesy), Organization (organization), Prose (prose), Profession (profession), Rank/Title (rank) or (title), Spell (spell), Species (species), Technology (technology), Tradition / Ritual (ritual) or (tradition) and Vehicle (vehicle).
While editing an article you can always find this list under "BBCODE REFERENCE" in the right sidebar.
Excerpts vs. Tooltips
While editing an article, go to the "Design" tab on top of the page and find the "Excerpt" text box:
That excerpt will appear when people hover over the link.
Like this;
If your article isn't created yet you can fix that by adding a tooltip like this;
Testy
Excerpts are to explain what an article is about. Tooltips can also be used for that. But it can also be used to explain words or concepts that you won't be making any articles for.
Block links and other tidbits
While you are editing an article, on the right sidebar below the to-do list you will find this:
The text link is just the regular link that you get with the mentioning system. But the block link looks like the left one if you are placing them at the bottom of the vignette or a text box or like the right one if you put it in the
sidebar.
Is there a way to provide alt name for article link? E.g. I want to link a character, but I want to use only the first name, or I want to link a organization (e.g. Kingdom of X) but I want to use X?
Yep, if you look at the first image you can see that I've written @world and gotten as a response at the top of the list "PatheticBarrel's World-Building Guide" Or did you mean something else?
Hmm, what I mean is that I have an article about some Taric LeSample. But I want to mention him as Duke LeSample for example. How can I do that? Is it possible if the article is not created yet?
The mentioning system works on the title of the article. If you create an article for him and name it Taric LeSample and then when you want to link to him on his sister's article you write a @tar or @les and his article will appear in a list together with other articles with similar names. You click on his article and a string of text looking like this will appear:
If you haven't created Taric's article yet but you are writing his sisters article and you want to mention him as Duke LeSample you just type (a)Duke LeSample(person) and this link will work when you create an article with that name. (if you click the link an you will automatically end up on an empty article with that name) If you are a Guild member the article will appear in the to-do-list and you can just change the title of the article later on when you have named him. If you aren't a guild member it's a lot easier to just create the article with the purple button and use the link that the button gives you and place it there and later rename the article. (it will still say Duke LeSample on his sister's article until you change it since the text within the [ ] is the name the article had when you linked it on that article. )
Thanks mate, cheers!
Cheers :)