Wikipedia/Mediawiki – How to Mention Someone in a Conversation

mediawikiwikipedia

In Wikipedia talk pages discussions, I see people often mention each other.
Mentioned people receive a notification.

How to mention people?

For instance let's say I want to mention the user called Joe.
Solutions that work on all Mediawiki sites preferred.

You can use the Wikimedia "pipe trick" to keep from having to repeat the username:

[[User:Username|]]

turns into

 [[User:Username|Username]]

Wikipedia¹ has some templates that are set up for this. You could just use the User link template

{{u|Username}}

To be more "Twitter-like", there's the ping template (aka "Reply to")

This template is particularly helpful in discussions that are not threaded, to indicate which user's comment is referenced.

{{ping|Username}}

results in

@[[User:Username|Username]]

¹ English Wikipedia. Other language versions likely have different templates (if they have any).