Wikipedia:Cargoculting

Cargo cults are millenarian movements that arose in Melanesia under colonial rule, and inspired Richard Feynman to coin the expression cargo cult science. In Feynman's description, after the end of the Second World War practitioners believed that air delivery of cargo would resume if they carried out the proper rituals, such as building runways, lighting fires next to them, and wearing headphones carved from wood while sitting in fabricated control towers. "The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work."

On Wikipedia, cargoculting (alternatively rendered cargo-culting or cargo culting) is when an editor attempts to replicate certain layout or formatting conventions, but does so incorrectly due to their incomplete knowledge of Wiki markup. Depending on what an editor goes for, the resulting lookalike may not function or behave in the exact same manner as the intended item.

This is not to be confused with cargo cult programming in its traditional sense, which refers to the practice of blindly inserting useless code into programs without understanding why it is even used in the first place. Instead, "cargoculting" in this case refers to the practice of formatting article text to resemble subheadings or inline tags (instead of actually producing them with the proper Wiki syntax), which is analogous to how real cargo cult practitioners have built structures that resemble runways or air traffic control towers.

Examples

Desired item		Cargoculted version(s)		Correct syntax
		Erroneous syntax	Appearance
Level 3 subheading	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	<big>'''Example'''</big> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	===Example=== Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. === Example === Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Level 4 subheading	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	'''Example''' Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	====Example==== Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. ==== Example ==== Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Reference footnote	Foo bar.	Foo bar.[1]	Foo bar.[1]	Foo bar.<ref>https://www.example.com</ref>
		Foo bar.<sup>[1]</sup>	Foo bar.[1]
		Foo bar.<sup>[https://www.example.com]</sup>	Foo bar.[1]
Inline maintenance tag	Foo bar.	Foo bar.[citation needed]	Foo bar.[citation needed]	Foo bar.{{citation needed}}
		Foo bar.<sup>[citation needed]</sup>	Foo bar.[citation needed]
		Foo bar.<sup>[''[[Wikipedia:Citation needed|citation needed]]'']</sup>	Foo bar.[citation needed]
Numbered list	Foo Bar	1. Foo 2. Bar	1. Foo 2. Bar	# Foo # Bar
Hatnote	See also: Example	:''See also: [[Example]]''	See also: Example	{{see also|Example}}
Indentation	Foo Bar	Foo Bar	Foo Bar	Foo :Bar

Markdown

An editor who is more accustomed to Markdown than they are to markup (or who pastes LLM-generated text into one or more pages) may produce text containing characters intended to modify the appearance of the text they are used on in particular ways, but which don't work (or work differently) on Wikipedia. In such cases, Markdown-based cargoculting is generally much more noticeable.

Desired item		Cargoculted version(s)		Correct syntax
		Erroneous syntax	Appearance
Bold text	This is an example.	This is **an example**.	This is **an example**.	This is '''an example'''.
Section heading	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	## Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	Example Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.	==Example== Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. == Example == Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Intentionally fake elements

On pages besides articles, especially for documentation purposes, it may be helpful to display text with features that look identical to their counterparts, but don't actually work like them. The table below lists some templates designed for this purpose:

Documentation templates

Template	Appearance
{{fake clarify}}
{{fake verification needed}}
{{fake explain}}
{{fake heading}}	Section
{{fake notes and references}}	Notes References
{{dummy reference}}
{{dummy backlink}}	^
{{dummy footnote}}	1. ^ Citation
{{fake link}}	default
{{fake redlink}}	default

See also

• User:Uncle G/Cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing