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About 8 months ago now, I got the idea of creating a standard pseudocode for use across Wikipedia. As you can see from the talk pages, this idea was not welcomed by others, who variously thought:
- Wikicode looks just like (random language), why not just use that?
- We shouldn't invent our own pseudocode, we should use real languages only, because they can be run.
- People should all be able to make up their own pseudocode however they like.
- Wikicode is too detailed; pseudocode should only contain prose descriptions, not symbols.
I don't really agree with any of these points, and argued vociferously against them, but ultimately the community has the last say. I'll keep using something like it in my own editing, and I've archived the introduction and specification here for reference purposes, but as of now Wikicode is no longer proposed; only use it if you want to, and do not use the {{wikicode}} template at all.
Wikicode is a proposed standard for describing algorithms and other small code samples across Wikipedia in a way that is easy to read and edit. This page contains a concise tutorial and reference for the pseudocode. You may also wish to see its complete specification and discussion about it.
The point of the Wikicode proposal is to offer a generally applicable pseudocode so that articles trying to accomplish the same thing (describing algorithms) can have a similar appearance. However, this does not mean real source code should not be used, and if changing the pseudocode in some way is helpful in a particular article, feel free to do so. Wikicode does not restrict, only suggests. If you want to help add or convert pseudocode in existing articles to use wikicode, please see User:Dcoetzee/Wikicode/Pages needing conversion.