Templates are a Wikimedia tool that serve a number of useful functions at Wikipedia, as they allow text to be uniformly formatted, and easily changed across a number of articles, while also reducing the keystrokes required to enter repetitive information, such as citation references. Templates, like most things at Wikipedia, can be created by any editor. However, like all things, templates can be misused. This page discusses guidelines for using templates in the course of editing; for guidance on creating new templates, please be sure to read WP:TEMPLATE.
A template takes the form of a template name (and possibly some parameters) between a pair of "curly braces" ("{" and "}"). This text is then replaced in the reader's page with the appropriate text taken from the template's definition.
In other words, when you enter { cite }, it is replaced by a more complex citation format, like this: {{
citation}}: Empty citation (
help).
Current usage of templates in Wikipedia has evolved along several main lines.
- Simplification of complex entries like citations
- Insertion of uniformly-formatted blocks such as info boxes for biographies or album discographies
- Insertion of dispute or issue notifications in articles
- Categorization
As the reference (< ref >) format has blah blah blah too many paramaters yada yada yada
Many articles utilize commonly-formatted blocks that display details about a particular type of thing, in a way that makes it easier to find those details when looking through several related articles. For instance, biographies should all include BIO template, which provides parameters for the person's name, date & place of birth, and other common biographical details. The editor needs to enter much less text, and the info box is automatically formatted identically to all other instances of the same template. Equally importantly, if a change is made that improves the format of the BIO box, there's no need to propagate this change manually; use of the template causes this to happen automagically.
A number of templates have been developed for use in flagging disputes in articles, and for flagging articles that need special attention, such as clean-up or copy-editing. These tags can be very useful. Not only do they serve to notify other editors that work needs to be done, they also allow us to alert readers that the current state of the article may not match consensus, and hence may be less reliable.
However, these templates can also be the source of contention, and even bruised feelings among editors, particularly the so-called "nag tags" which complain of needed editing. If an article is being activey edited, it may best to note your concerns on the talk page, rather than abruptly inserting a prominently visible notice in the article.
Templates are also used to add categorization (and cross-wiki links) to articles.