Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Wikilinks & Backlinks.

If you use Obsidian as your knowledge base, wikilinks are probably the feature you’ll reach for the most. Every link you create is bidirectional — meaning the note you’re linking to automatically knows it’s been referenced. That’s what makes Obsidian’s knowledge graph so powerful, and it all starts with understanding the syntax.

The wiki lays out eight different ways to create a wikilink, so let me walk you through them in plain language.

The simplest form is just wrapping a note’s filename in double square brackets. That creates a direct link to that note by name. If you want the link to display different text to the reader — say you want it to read “our onboarding guide” but it actually points to a note called New Staff Process 2026 — you can add a separator between the note name and the display text you want shown. The link works the same way, it just looks different on screen.

If you want to be more precise about which note you’re pointing to — which is a good idea in larger vaults where notes in different folders might share similar names — you can include the full folder path from the vault root, not just the filename.

You can also link to a specific section inside a note rather than the whole thing. By appending the heading name after the note name, Obsidian will jump straight to that heading when you follow the link. There’s also a block-level version of this — instead of a heading, you link to a specific paragraph or list item using a block identifier that Obsidian generates for you.

Then there are embed links. These are a step beyond regular links — instead of just pointing to a note, they pull that content directly into the current page inline. You can embed a full note, just a specific section of a note, or an image file. All three work the same way, just with a different target.

Now let’s talk about how Obsidian figures out which note you mean when you write a link. It follows a two-step process. First, it looks for an exact path match from the vault root. If it doesn’t find one, it searches for any note with that filename anywhere in the vault, and if there are multiple matches it picks the one with the shortest path. To avoid ambiguity — especially as your vault grows — the recommendation is to always use the full path from the vault root.

Next up is one of the most useful features Obsidian offers: the Backlinks panel. You’ll find this in the right sidebar of any note, and it shows you two things. First, linked mentions — notes that have explicitly created a wikilink pointing to the note you’re currently reading. Second, unlinked mentions — notes that mention your note’s title as plain text, without a formal link. That second category is particularly useful for finding connections you haven’t formalised yet. To enable it, go to Settings, then Core Plugins, and switch on Backlinks.

There’s also the Outgoing Links panel, which works the other way around. While backlinks show you what points to the current note, outgoing links shows you everything the current note points to. It breaks these down into resolved links — where the target note exists — and unresolved links, where the target hasn’t been created yet. Unresolved links appear in a different colour and show up as what the wiki calls a ghost node in the graph view. So even a link to a note that doesn’t exist yet leaves a visible mark, which can be a handy way to spot gaps in your knowledge base.

When you’re writing and want to insert a link, you trigger the autocomplete picker by typing two opening square brackets. This opens a fuzzy search across all your note titles, so you don’t need to type the exact name — just enough of it for Obsidian to recognise it. You can press Tab to accept a suggestion or Enter to open the note directly.

Finally, there’s Page Preview. If you hold the Control key and hover your mouse over any wikilink, a popup appears showing you that linked note’s content — without navigating away from what you’re currently reading. This requires the Page Preview core plugin to be enabled, which you’ll find alongside the others in Settings.

So that’s the full picture of wikilinks and backlinks in Obsidian — from creating links and embedding content, right through to understanding how the graph connects everything together.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.