Help:Magic

The magic of this wiki's software transforms text for you in several useful ways.

Pipe trick
When you create a link which ends in a PIPE CHARACTER, here's an example of what happens.

TechInfoDepot:Community Portal
 * turns into Community Portal
 * appears as Community Portal
 * provides a link to the community portal, which is what you would expect

User:Example user
 * turns into Example user
 * appears as Example user
 * provides a link to the user page, which is what you would want most of the time
 * This does not work in edit summaries.

User talk:Example user
 * turns into Example user
 * appears as Example user
 * provides a link to the user's talk page, which may not be what you want

Category:Continents
 * turns into Continents
 * appears as Continents
 * provides a link to the Category page for continents
 * Note that the first COLON CHARACTER prevents the link from causing the page containing it being listed in this category. This is how to link to a category without the link causing the page it is on being listed in the category. Only use the first colon if you DON'T want the page listed in that category. If you do want it listed in the category, use the regular category link without the first colon.

John Smith (explorer)
 * turns into John Smith
 * appears as John Smith
 * links to the John Smith (explorer) article
 * This is appropriate when linking to disambiguated pages.

Suffix trick
Professorial
 * appears as Professorial but links to Professor, not to Professorial

Professors
 * appears as Professors but links to Professor, not to Professors

However this intentionally does not work with apostrophes, so the 's in Professor's does not become part of the link, and instead appears as Professor's in this example.

Initial character case insensitive
noodle
 * appears as noodle but links to Noodle, not to noodle. So just use whichever initial case is appropriate for the text the link appears in.

Tildes
Use the TILDE CHARACTER to insert your username and/or a timestamp. This makes discussions easier to follow.

Three tildes (your name)

 * turns into Uncle Ed

Four tildes (name and date)
~
 * turns into Uncle Ed July 7, 2005 14:26 (UTC)

Five tildes (just the date)

 * turns into July 7, 2005 14:26 (UTC)

ISBN
ISBN codes automatically generate links, for example: the wikitext  becomes ISBN 978-0-45-152774-5 which corresponds to Special:Booksources/9780451527745.

RFC
becomes RFC 1149, which is the external link to the standard at:

PMID
becomes PMID 20610307, which links to a reference in the medical literature at PubMed.

Templates
You can use templates to incorporate boilerplate text. You may have seen at the top of some articles notices like "merge with X" or "this page is marked for deletion" or "the neutrality of this article is disputed" or "an edit war was going on here, so we have locked the page".

They look pretty consistent, don't they? Well, it's all done with templates. looks like

looks like

looks like

looks like