Help talk:Templates

Templates and tags -- notjusttired (talk) 16:05, September 1, 2019 (EDT)

Templates are not the same as tags, although we do often use them as tags. Templates can also contain calculations, call Lua programming eg to categorize pages, and perform complex functions. It's important that people know that templates are not simply labels, but can contain key functions changing the way a page works. What templates actually do is add the same content to multiple pages more easily, some of that content may be hidden and some may be extremely complex. Many templates are used to add extra formatting eg Template:Quotation templates, Template:Chem2 or functions eg Template:Video and Template:Graph both call extensions directly. Removing a template can remove a page from multiple categories, eg licensing templates. notjusttired (talk) 16:05, September 1, 2019 (EDT) User:Pyrrhus can we stop using the term "template tags"? Also templates are not notes, they are pages with commonly used messages or code, they are us hey to either provide features like formatting or tracking pages, or to add functions, or to display messages. Examples include

• the stub message, which also adds the page to the stub tracking category
• warning messages and images
• lists of pages in a category
• the copyright licensing templates, which put pages in the right category and display a message
• random article template used in the portals
• formatting text to Sentence case
• formatting a citation

MediaWiki uses tag to mean either HTML tag, or tagging a page (basically a label with a tracking category), eg as a minor edit or new page (Recent Changes calls these "tags". Njt (talk) 06:26, September 20, 2019 (EDT)

A "Template" is a page in the "Template:" namespace, such as "Template:MyTemplate". A "Template Tag" is an inserted note to reference such a page, such as {{MyTemplate}}. New users don't know or care about "Templates", they only care about "Template Tags", since that is all they see when they edit pages. (e.g. {{stub}, {{cleanup}}, etc.) They don't care how these inserted notes work, they only care that these tags are inserted in the correct places for the correct reasons. Try to see it from the perspective of a new user. A new user would assume that anything named "Template" must refer to a standard form that needs to be filled in, which is the obvious interpretation of the word "Template", but this obvious interpretation is very very far from MediaWiki's bizarre use of the word. So we need to be very careful about using the word "Template" with new users, as they are likely to end up very very confused. However, using the term "Template Tag" to refer to the inserted notes such as {{MyTemplate}} will be readily accepted by new users. You should also note that JenB uses the term "Template" to refer to an Article Outline, which is certainly a more logical use of the word "Template". In fact, the original name of the Article Outlines page was MEpedia Templates, which was later redirected to the Article Outlines. (I have since turned that page into a disambiguation page due to all the confusion over the word "Template".) I hope this is clear.

Pyrrhus (talk) 17:02, September 20, 2019 (EDT)

I have edited the page to better distinguish between template pages and template tags. I also included your language above so readers can appreciate the variety of things that template pages can do.

Pyrrhus (talk) 23:21, September 20, 2019 (EDT)

User:Pyrrhus Thanks. MediaWiki refers to anything enclosed with < > as either "tag extensions" or simply "tags". At they moment, I can't think of any template tags other than <templatedata>

 Njt (talk) 18:43, September 23, 2019 (EDT)

Citations

Citation is a template that can be used correctly. I think listing all the citation templates here would be helpful since we don't have all the Wikipedia ones, and we have Cite tweet as an extra. notjusttired (talk) 16:05, September 1, 2019 (EDT)

Cleanup templates

Although unfinished, we should encourage people to use the most specific one for their issue, all are subpages of Template:Cleanup eg Template:Cleanup/POV - these are easier to browse via the Visual editor. notjusttired (talk) 16:05, September 1, 2019 (EDT)

Screenshot

Showing a screenshot of how to find citations via the Visual editor's Insert menu would be useful. notjusttired (talk) 16:05, September 1, 2019 (EDT)