Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-653063-20150218021309/@comment-4902411-20150306000304

It seems you are confused with magic words and the pre tag behavior, and I don't blame you for that; it's the way TableWiz phrased it.

To name it properly, a whitespace character at the beginning of a new line results in the pre tag. Magic words are used for working with strings in a more, for a lack of a better term, "wikitext-friendly" way using php. And, this phantom pre tag is not a magic word. I don't ever recall reading about it in any of the help pages here or on mediawiki, and I doubt if it has ever been documented anywhere. I never really bothered to look for such trivial formatting tweaks. To sum it up, the help pages aren't inefficient (at least Help:Magic_words isn't), more of a mere misunderstanding of facts. Though I do agree this whitespace behavior should be documented somewhere in the help pages.

About Help:Magic_words, I don't see an issue with linking to the mediawiki page. The full list states the mw version the magic words are compatible with. Wikia's current mediawiki version is, so there's no need for more tedious lists when wonderful resources like mediawiki still exist. Also, you seem confused about mediawiki. MediaWiki is the platform on which Wikia runs, a platform for hosting wikis.

Quite frankly, I've seen a lot of users not actually referring to the help pages for help (quite ironical), but post to thr forums. There's piles and piles of threads that simply link to help pages, because the users who make those threads are either too lazy to go through the help pages or search in the wrong place.