The template on most pages is easier now than before, what is most needed is just adding text. Example: open the DF Wiki, enter Masterwork and navigate to the main page, click on the left-hand link "pages that link here" and you'll get the lists like this one:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Category:Masterwork:Tattered_Quality_Articles
Pick one and just enter the text.
Category:Masterwork:Stub is another useful category. Not all stubs are in both of them, though, so checking both is a good idea.
It's all Greek to me.
I remember how that feels...
If I have time, I'll add some more useful help pages. The ones on
mediawiki.org are somewhat useful (at least for basic syntax), but they can't all be copied over easily (they use extensions that aren't installed on the DF wiki), and the DF wiki has some important differences not covered in the MediaWiki documentation.
Actually, it turns out that the Metal page uses templates to generate the table, which makes it a lot harder to determine what it's doing (personally, I don't like these templates much - you need to have one for every row in the table, which gets tedious to maintain).
Also: You can rate articles using the "rate" tab at the top - this is useful for categorizing them based on their quality/completeness. I just updated this script (it's autoconfirmed-only for now, until I add captcha support), so try it out when you get a chance!