helpful detritus

When a helpful nugget of wisdom hits me, I'll share it here as well as where I found it.

add a link while editing

WikiCode is peppered with examples of [[double brackets]], with more ideas at Help:URL, Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing, and Help:Cheatsheet. Also useful are Wikipedia:FAQ/Readers, Wikipedia:Contributing_to_Wikipedia, and Wikipedia:About, with advanced info available in many places including Help:Introduction_to_referencing/1

internal link to pages outside the main article space

Linking internally to Wikipedia's other sections isn't as straightforward as linking directly between articles. More info is at Help:URL under "URLs of Wikipedia pages."

For example, the diff template can be used with this text
{{diff|2012_Lamma_Island_ferry_collision|516164279|516159603|changes I made in 2012}}
to display changes I made in 2012 to a ferry crash article.

The first field is the article name, then the new revision's serial number, then the old serial, and lastly the custom text. Finding the serial numbers was cumbersome and required flipping back and forth on the article's history. Granted, I may have missed a timesaving step.

external link outside Wikipedia

External links are simple; a plain URL is converted to a link automatically:
http://example.com displays as http://example.com

Putting the link inside brackets makes a footnote-style link:
[http://example.com ] displays as [1]

Custom text may be appended after a space:
[http://example.com example dot com] displays as example dot com

article the second

the TOC looked silly with #1 but no #2. I'll put more useful stuff here later

no really I mean it

Honest truthful.