“Wiki wiki” means “quick” in Hawai'ian.

All you really need to know is:

• To edit any page click on the Edit Text link at the bottom of the page. You should do that right now, and read the source code of this page. It will make more sense.
• You get italics by surrounding words with two single quotes on either side like this.
• You get bold text by using two underscores on either side.
• And, bold italics by using both.
• You get bullets by using an asterisk * at the start of the line
• To have plain monospaced font, indent with a space:

 this is a poem
 about monospacing
 nothing rhymes with poem
 nothing rhymes with monospacing

• You can separate paragraphs with an extra blank line. Example:

I am a paragraph.

I am a paragraph too. We're just very small paragraphs.

• You can get horizontal rules with four or more dashes like this:

• To create hyperlinks you just capitalize the words and string them together. Let's say you want to create a page about how Steve Wainstead eats worms. All you have to do is capitalize each word and string them together like this: SteveWainsteadEatsWorms?. If the page does not exist yet a question mark appears after the link, inviting you to create the page: ThisPageShouldNotExist?. (And please don't ruin the example by creating one.)
• To link to pages outside the Wiki, you can just type in the URL and Wiki will link it for you: http://www.nytimes.com/
• To put images in, just provide the hyperlink in brackets like this: [http://www.yourhost.yourdomain/images/picture.png]. Image URLs not in brackets will just appear as hyperlinks to the image.
• Now you are ready to begin AddingPages.

A WikiWikiWeb is meant to be fast and easy to edit. It has very simple markup that you can read about in TextFormattingRules.