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This essay describes techniques to debug a Wikipedia template for various problems in the structure of the wikitext used. The wikitext parser has been used for years and, although the markup might seem confusing, the language is extremely reliable: the nesting of if-else functions, nested up to 40 levels deep, can be trusted to correctly match the corresponding 40 if-else clauses and pass hundreds of parameters under the correct names, even in a 2,000-line template. However, there are some restrictions which might surprise some users, such as passing an equals-sign "=" in data by template "{{=}}" (see below: "Unusual restrictions").