Help:Magic words for beginners

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:MagicBegin WP:MfB

Magic words are words surrounded by brackets or underscores which most often insert or display the current value of what they are called. These include parser functions, variables and behavior switches and are features of wikitext. They are interpreted by the Metawiki software and are often used in templates so that they show different information depending on which page they are on and many other conditions.