Wiki Markup/Basic Markup Language

MediaWiki's markup system may sound daunting and complex at first glance, but it's not nearly as hard as it seems! First, let's start with "bold", all you do is wrap the text you want to be bold in '''. For example: if I wanted to make the word "Cat" bold, I would type '''Cat'''. It would produce this result: Cat. To put text in italics, you'd do the same but in two ''s. Example: ''cat'' would produce the result cat.

Next, linking. To link to another article, you would wrap the article name in square brackets. For example, to link to the page History, you would type [[History]]. That would produce the result History. To link to an external link, you would set it out like this [URL Text]. For example, if one types [http://www.google.co.uk Google], the system would produce the result Google. It's that simple.

The next important thing is templates. To transclude a template, one would type (let's take the template Lorem ipsum for example) {{Lorem ipsum}}. However, some templates require that you determine variables. To determine variable X on template Y one would type {{X|Y=Test}}. This is especially useful in infoboxes that rely on the information you enter. To substitute a template for its code (only recommended for warnings, and similar circumstances), you simply add the subst: prefix. Finally, categorisation. To add a page to a category you simply type [[Category:Category name]]. This code would add the page to category Category name.

That's it for the basics of Wikipedia markup!