Help:Hints, answers and solutions

Puzzles are meant to be puzzled over. Sometimes though, a hint, or even a solutions is necessary, so when appropriate, these can be added to a puzzle page. To avoid unwanted spoilers, all hints, answers and solutions should be enclosed in the hint, answer and solution templates, respectively. This will hide the content by default. Note that even unregistered users can view these spoilers, so teachers who wish to use these puzzles as homework should be cautious of students finding the answers here. If anyone has an idea of how to limit "cheating" please share.

Template usage

There are three templates in use here: Help, Answer and Solution. Each works identically. To include a hint on a page, you would use:

{{Hint | ...the hint... }}

An answer:

{{Answer | ...the answer... }}

A solution:

{{Solution | ...the solution... }}

The content can span multiple lines, although use of '=' is problematic as the template interprets this as assigning a parameter a value. If an '=' sign is required, either enclose it in <nowiki> </nowiki> tags, or use math mode.

Answers vs solutions

There is no hard and fast rule which should be used when, but basically an answer should be something between a hint and a solution. Many puzzles are interesting not in what the answer is, but in how we know that answer is correct. A detailed discussion of the answer (including perhaps a proof that the answer is correct) should be given as a solution. See for example the next letter or four travelers puzzles.