Help:Templates

A template is a special type of page that has been designed so its content can be included in other pages. Since a given template can be included in many pages, it can help reduce duplication and promote a uniform style between pages.

Templates can be useful for...

Creating content that should appear on many pages. Formatting content (such as infoboxes) in a way that should be consistent across many pages. Creating a shortcut to a frequently-visited page or for writing things that you repeat often when communicating with others. Replacing long, complicated code so that a page is easier for other users to edit. Protecting parts of a page from editing while leaving other sections open for edits. Templates are usually located in the Template namespace. This includes any page with a name beginning with Template:, such as Template:Name. A list of used templates can be seen in Special:Templates and can be filtered by template types.

Note: Templates cannot be edited by anonymous users[1].

How to create a basic template Templates can be very powerful, but also sometimes very complicated. It often helps to start by creating the simplest possible kind of template, and then experimenting from there.

On your community, navigate to "Template:Example" using the address bar of your browser and click "Create". You should see a popup asking you to Choose template type; check one of the options. Type "Hello, World" in the editor. Click "Publish". You have just created a template with some sample content. On your community, create a new article called "Template test". In the editor, go to source mode and enter the following code:

Click Publish. Your "Testing Templates" page should display the text you added to your template. You've successfully created and used a template! Now you can change the content of your template and add it to more pages to make it more useful for your community.

Adding pre-existing templates Templates-rightrail New FANDOM communities come with pre-loaded default templates. You can view a complete list of templates available on your community by going to Special:AllPages and selecting "Template" from the namespace dropdown menu. Click "Go" and all available templates will appear in a list.

In the editor's visual mode, you can select from the list of all templates available on your community by clicking "Add other templates". In source mode, you can use the code to add any template to your page. Advanced users can edit the page MediaWiki:Editor-template-list to change the list of templates available by default in the "Templates" section of the editor. Up to four templates can be in this list. Advanced templates Template parameters Templates can have parameters. These allow you to alter the way the template is displayed, such as including specific text or altering the design.

To take Template:Wikipedia as an example, adding just assumes that the page on Wikipedia is the same name as the page of the current page the template is used on. However, a parameter can be added, e.g., to tell the template that the page on Wikipedia was Microsoft.

To learn more about how to change the output of the template based on what the user inputs, see Help:Template parameters and Help:Parser functions.

Substituting templates A different way to use a template is to substitute its content into a page. This is done by inserting subst: immediately after the opening braces:. Once the page is saved, the link to the template is removed and the template output is substituted in its place and can be further edited. Any updates to the template will not affect the content that was substituted into the page.

To learn more, visit Help:Substituting templates.