User:Gabinaluz/Vocabulary term

Inhabiting the Wikimedia World

While Wikimedia is a well-known movement, and almost everyone interacts with it in some way (who hasn't concluded an argument with a friend by checking something on Wikipedia?), understanding how it operates requires familiarity with a lot of new terminology.

During my initial contributions to the Wiki Edu Dashboard project, I had to immerse myself in the wiki-world for the first time. Even to address the simplest issues available in the repository, it was necessary to take some time to understand the context of the issue, which always involved learning more about the inner workings of the wikimedia ecosystem.

Depths of wikitext

One of the first things I had to deal with was the glorious wikitext. Wikitext is a specific markup language used by WikiMedia software, allowing users to format the text. It has its own syntax (as every language!) so that you can write in bold, or make something italic.

When I was examining some wikitext examples, I discovered the use of something called templates. Templates are usually inserted in wikitext using curly braces: {{templatename}}. Essentially, they are standard wiki pages intended to be embedded frequently within other pages. They are used when a specific message or format needs to appear consistently across different pages. For example:

Templates are particularly useful for adding references, and references are the main focus of my current project. Consequently, understanding how templates work was imperative for me.

Initially, it was a bit confusing, but thankfully there is an abundance of documentation available for reference. I was even able to consult with other community members about this, and they shared some tools to explore the use of templates across the various wikis!