[Mediawiki-l] noob questions

[Dave Howorth]

Hello,

I'm setting up a small mediawiki site with content migrated from kwiki. 
I'm getting quite confused by how to find out how to do things with 
mediawiki, so I joined this list to ask some questions. But I'm even 
confused about whether this is the right place :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mailing_lists says "MediaWiki-l 
for people with questions about their own installation of MediaWiki", 
but the sign-up page for the list suggest a different focus "MediaWiki-l 
-- MediaWiki announcements and site admin list". So my apologies if I'm 
not in the right place.

I have one page where I'm documenting how some of my code works. It's 
Javascript so the text is liberally scattered with HTML tags that I'm 
discussing. But mediawiki is *interpreting* these tags as HTML! I see 
that this is a feature from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing 
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:HTML_in_wikitext even tells me 
which tags are affected. But I can't find anywhere that tells me how to 
turn this feature off when I don't want it. How can I write text that 
includes HTML tags as literals?

I'm also trying to include some images of what the resulting page looks 
like. I succeeded by just adding something like 
http://localhost/htdocs/images/one-line-evidence.png to my wikitext, but 
I suspect that's not the pukka way to do it. Is there a better way?

Oh, is there a searchable archive for this list?

Thanks and regards,
Dave Howorth