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. "1. first line"
2. "2. second line"
3. "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/*"]]