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Assistant for Magic Words
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 An assistant to insert magic words into a page.
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Magic words are features of wiki markup that give instructions to Wikipedia's
underlying MediaWiki software. Magic words are of three main kinds: "parser
functions", "variables" and "behavior switches". These, for example, can suppress or
position the table of contents, disable indexing by external search engines, and
produce output dynamically based on the current page or on user-defined conditional
logic. Some of these features are especially useful for templates.
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There are three main types of magic words:
· Behavior switches
· Variables
· Parser functions
Uppercase words surrounded by double underscores, e.g., __NOTOC__ or other
keywords using parser function syntax.
Variables
Uppercase words surrounded by double braces (thus resembling templates), e.g.
{{PAGENAME}}. Variables can be grouped into several types:
· Page variables
· Site variables
· Date and time variables
· Revision data variables
· Statistics variables
Page-dependent magic words will affect or return data about the current page, even if
the word is added through a transcluded template or included in a system message.
It is possible to substitute parser functions and most variables in the same way that
templates are substituted (using the subst: keyword). This causes their current value
(as evaluated at the time of substitution) to be written into the wikitext.
Parser functions can be grouped into several types:
· Metadata
· Formating
· Path (URL)
· Conditional
· Other functions
This assistant is a repository of more than one hundred Magic words you can use in
your edition. These are grouped in twelve clusters, . Just select the magic word you
want to use and click on <Insert Magic word> to insert the selected item into the Edit
window.
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