On 11/12/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
By seeing an existing ISBN link, saying "Hey, how did they do that?",
and looking at the page source. That's how people (at least techy
people) normally learn how to use various languages, they do it by
copying examples. If it got magically converted to a template, you
would say "Oh, it's just a template", and use the template. Unless
you happened to stumble across a specific discussion of the feature,
you would never know about it.
If typing "ISBN xxx" is automagically converted to "{{ISBN|xxx}}"
then
there's no harm in people only knowing the latter form, is there...
The same goes for pipe tricks - ultimately all it can do is save you a few
keystrokes. You don't get any new functionality by typing [[Foo (blah)|]]
that you couldn't get just by typing [[Foo (blah)|Foo]].
There's a reason, you know, that talk pages tend to have a message at
the top telling everyone about ~~~~.
That one's a bit different. There's no other way to produce the signature
(short of manually typing your linked username and the date and time), and
the transformed output bears no relation to the input.
Steve