Text on this wiki is, by default, written in a form very close to how you might write text for an email message. This style of text formatting is called MarkDown, and it works like this:

Leave blank lines between paragraphs.

You can *emphasise* or **strongly emphasise** text by placing it in single or double asterisks.

To create a list, start each line with an asterisk:

"* this is my list"
"* another item"

To make a numbered list, start each line with a number (any number will do) followed by a period:

"1. first line"
"2. second line"
"2. third line"

To create a header, start a line with one or more # characters followed by a space and the header text. The number of # characters controls the size of the header:

# h1

## h2

### h3

#### h4

##### h5

###### h6

To create a horizontal rule, just write three or more dashes or stars on their own line:

To quote someone, prefix the quote with ">":

To be or not to be, that is the question.

To write a code block, indent each line with a tab or 4 spaces:

10 PRINT "Hello, world!"
20 GOTO 10

To link to an url or email address, you can just put the url in angle brackets: <http://ikiwiki.info>, or you can use the form [link text](url)

In addition to basic html formatting using MarkDown, this wiki lets you use the following additional features:

To link to another page on the wiki, place the page's name inside double square brackets. So you would use [[WikiLink]] to link to WikiLink.
Insert smileys and some other useful symbols.
Use shortcuts to link to common resources.

[[!wikipedia War_of_1812]]
Create and fill out templates for repeated chunks of parameterized wiki text.
Insert various directives onto a page to perform useful actions. For example, you can:
- Add a table of contents to a page:
  
  [[!toc ]]
- Change the title of a page:
  
  [[!meta title="full page title"]]
- Create a blog by inlining a set of pages:
  
  [[!inline pages="blog/*"]]
Full list of directives enabled for this wiki: