Help:Automatic conversion of wikitext

There are three categories of automatic conversion of wikitext:

• In a preview, the rendering of the result already shows up in the preview itself, but the conversion is not yet shown in the edit box (save and press Edit again to see the result of the conversion in the edit box, and to edit it):
  • ~~~~ produces e.g. Patrick 10:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC). This is a piped link to the user page and the UTC time and date, for use on talk pages. An alternative link label (nickname) can be set in the User Data section of the preferences. The feature can even be used to create an additional link to the user talk page, etc. See also Wikipedia:Signatures and Help:Editing#Links, URLs.
    • Additionally, there are:
      • ~~~ giving Patrick
      • ~~~~~ giving 08:41, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)
  • subst, see Help:Template#subst
  • see Piped link
• In a preview, the conversion is not yet shown at all:
  • extra lines of text (not extra text on the same line) after a redirect are automatically deleted
• In a preview, the conversion is already shown, even in the edit box:
  • in MediaWiki projects which use ISO-8859-1 character encoding (the English, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish Wikipedia), special characters that are not available in the limited character set are automatically converted to their decimal numeric codes on Preview or Save.
  • in the Esperanto Wikipedia, a character like Ŝ is automatically converted into the alternative notation Sx, because in some browsers it may not display in the edit box, even if it displays in the webpage (and Sx, whether resulting from this conversion or just typed, is rendered as Ŝ)

As opposed to rendering matters (what webpage results from given wikitext), these conversions are not demonstrated in looking at existing wikitext and webpages: the wikitext only shows the result, not how it was entered.

It also means that when testing these features, one has to remember or record what one has entered.