Help:Magic words

Magic words are strings of text that have special meaning within the wiki context. This page explains the commonly used magic words on the NixOS Wiki. For a comprehensive list of magic words available on a MediaWiki installation, see the MediaWiki help page; for developer documentation related to adding a new magic word, see the MediaWiki manual page.

There are three main types of magic words available on this wiki:

• Behaviour switches that change the display of a page;
• Variables, which might look like templates when invoked;
• Parser functions, which take parameters and return a value. They also resemble templates; for a more comprehensive overview see the ParserFunctions extension.

Magic Word	Description
Articles
__NOTOC__	Hides the table of contents on a page
__NOEDITSECTION__	Hides the edit link besides a section's header
__NEWSECTIONLINK__	Adds a new link at the top of the page, next to the "Edit" link, to add a new section to the page, similar to how new threads are added in talk pages
__NONEWSECTIONLINK__	Removes the add a new section link next to "Edit" link in talk pages
Categories
__NOGALLERY__	Used in category pages, removes thumbnails and provides regular links.
__HIDDENCAT__	Hides the category from being displayed at the end of the articles in this category. Useful for maintenance categories.
__EXPECTUNUSEDCATEGORY__	When used on a category, removes it from Special:UnusedCategories even when it's empty.
Miscellaneous
__INDEX__	Tells search engines to index this page, regardless of wiki-wide settings. Note: robots.txt and the sitemap would still need to be configured, this shouldn't be used manually 99% of the time
__NOINDEX__	Tells search engines not to index this page
__STATICREDIRECT__	On redirect pages, prevents the redirect link from being updated when the user moves the page.
__EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__	Removes the template from Special:UnusedTemplates even if no page includes it.