Help:Magic words

Magic words are strings of text that MediaWiki associates with a return value or function, such as time, site details, or page names. This page is about usage of standard magic words; for a technical reference, see.

There are three general types of magic words:
 * Behavior switches: these are uppercase words surrounded by double underscores, e.g. __FOO__
 * Variables: these are uppercase words surrounded by double braces, e.g.  . As such, they look a lot like templates.
 * Parser functions: these take parameters and are either of the form   or  . See also.

Page-dependent magic words will affect or return data about the current page (by default), even if the word is added through a transcluded template or included system message.

Behavior switches
A behavior switch controls the layout or behaviour of the page and can often be used to specify desired omissions and inclusions in the content.

Variables
Variables return information about the current page, wiki, or date. Their syntax is similar to templates. Variables marked as " [expensive] " are tracked by the software, and the number that can be included on a page is limited.

If a template name conflicts with a variable, the variable will be used (so to transclude the template    :PAGENAME you would need to write  ). In some cases, adding parameters will force the parser to treat a variable as a template; for example, transcludes     :CURRENTDAYNAME.

Date & time
The following variables return the current date and time according to the user's timezone preferences, defaulting to the UTC timezone.

Due to MediaWiki and browser caching, these variables frequently show when the page was cached rather than the current time.

The following variables do the same as the above, but using the site's local timezone instead of user preferences and UTC:

Technical metadata
Revision variables return data about the latest edit to the current page, even if viewing an older version of the page.

Statistics
Numbers returned by these variables normally contain separators (commas or spaces, depending on the local language), but can return raw numbers with the ":R" flag (for example, &rarr;  and  &rarr; ). Use "|R" for magic words that require a parameter like PAGESINCATEGORY (for example and  ).

Page names
The following are URL-encoded equivalents:

Namespaces
The following are URL-encoded equivalents:

Parser functions
Parser functions are very similar to variables, but take one or more parameters (technically, any magic word that takes a parameter is a parser function), and the name is sometimes prefixed with a hash to distinguish them from templates.

Namespaces
returns the localized name for the namespace with that index. is the URL-encoded equivalent. It does the same, but it replaces spaces with underscores, making it usable in external links.