This is the (currently) boring Wikipedia page for long-time hardly-contributor to Wikipedia, Nicol. My very first—and epic—contribution to Wikipedia is linked to here. That was in 2003. I've been ahead of the curve for a long time.
Examples of articles on Wikipedia I've trivially edited:
For citations, notes and references, the element <references/> is the modern way. The template {{ref}} is the old way. The template {{reflist}} internally uses the modern element, and allows for easier formatting. The madness—and here’s where is gets confusing—is that Template:refs is a redirect to Template:reflist. Conclusion:{{refs}} is good, {{ref}} is bad.
Suppose, hypothetically, you’re trying to write the wikitext that when rendered by MediaWiki will give an example of the wikitext needed to insert a template. Let’s call the template ‘reflist’, say. The wikitext that you should write to show the user ‘{{reflist}}’ is ‘{{tlx|reflist}}’.
You might want to put the above example inside XHTML <code>...</code> tags. This brings us to the natural meta-question: what wikitext do you have to write so that when WikiMedia renders it you get the literal phrase ‘<code>’? i.e. What wikitext did I have to put on my page to tell you to use <code>...</code> tags? It’s easy: you escape the < with <. Unlike in real XHTML, in wikitext there’s no need to escape the greater than sign as well.
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