A template is an element that can be reused in many pages.

Templates can be complicated but are invaluable to:

You can see all available templates at Category:Templates.

How to add a template to a page[edit | edit source]

Visual editor
Source editor
  1. Edit the page
  2. Go to the place where you want to insert the template
  3. Click Insert and then Template
  4. Search for the desired template
  5. Fill out any required or desired parameters
  6. Click Insert
  7. Save the changes
  1. Edit the page with the source editor
  2. Go to the place where you want to insert the template
  3. Write the name of the desired template between curly braces, like so: {{Name of the template}}
  4. Add any necessary or desired parameters, like so: {{Name of the template|param1=value}}
  5. Save the changes

How to edit an existing template[edit | edit source]

Warning! Editing a heavily used template can damage numerous pages, as well as overloading the servers, which have to update all the pages that include it. For this reason, some high-use templates are protected. Consider discussing any changes to important templates with the community before doing them.

  1. Go to the template page in the Template namespace, for example Template:Color
  2. Edit the page (templates can only be edited with the source editor)
  3. Do your changes
  4. Preview your changes in a page that uses the template (see below the Save button)
  5. Save the changes

How to create a new template[edit | edit source]

Templates live in the Template namespace, meaning that they have titles that start with the "Template:" prefix (e.g. Template:Button). Depending on its objective, you can either transwiki them from other wikis such as Wikipedia, or program its functionality from scratch. It's always a good idea to insert the categories to which the template belongs when you're creating a template, a short instructional text, and a presentation of the template functions between certain tags. The actual template code needs to be wrapped within <nowiki></nowiki> tags, to prevent a meaningless result from being shown on the template page itself.

How to transclude pages other than templates[edit | edit source]

You can also transclude pages other than templates by simply including the appropriate namespace. For example:

{{Help:Templates}}

will transclude this page. To transclude pages in the main namespace, prefix a colon like so:

{{:Bicycles}}

That being said, you can usually get better results using Template:Excerpt.

See also[edit | edit source]

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