Help:Templates
From Forgotten Realms Wiki
Contents |
[edit] List of useful content templates
[edit] Citation
Citation is important because it allows the wiki to demonstrate that a statement is true and beyond dispute. Articles with statements lacking citations run the risk of becoming disputed, and this is often more complicated than providing a good citation in the first instance.
Consider first what you are citing in order to decide which template is most appropriate.
- Books
- {{Cite book}} for citing books (novels or sourcebooks) – in general you can use
{{Cite book/Name of book|page number}}– see Category:Citation templates for a huge list. Most of the novels and sourcebooks should already have their own template. If not, you might have to create one or request that one is created for you. - Dragon magazine
- {{Cite dragon}} should be used for easily citing Dragon magazine.
- Dungeon magazine
- {{Cite dungeon}} should be used for easily citing Dungeon magazine.
- Web sites
- {{Cite web}} for citing a website, with subtemplates much like above, but less useful (because of the large number of potential websites out there from which things can be cited). Check Category:Web citation templates to see if there is already a template for the web site you are citing. If not, use the general {{Cite web}} template, or if you think that there will be lots of citations concerning the web site, create a subtemplate, or request that one is created.
- Mailing list
- The [Forgotten Realms mailing list archives] are full of information of one kind or another. Use {{Cite frlist}} to cite an individual message on the list archives, but beware of the accuracy of these posts. Most are made by Realms fans and not authors, so should not be relied upon.
[edit] Page templates
- Category:Infoboxes may have a more complete and/or up-to-date list.
- Template:Book for an article about a novel or sourcebook.
- Template:Class for a character class.
- Template:Computer game for a computer game.
- Template:Creature for a creature.
- Template:Deity for articles on deities.
- Template:Location for an area, like a country, territory, city, town, etc.
- Template:Person for a person.
- Template:Plane for articles on planes.
- Template:Spell for articles on spells.
[edit] Chronology
- Template:Roll of years to specify a DR year and its name, and have the number converted to other reckonings automatically.
- Template:Yearbox is for allowing quick navigation from one year to nearby years.
- Template:Yearbox/deaths, Template:Yearbox/in-politics, Template:Yearbox/migrations, etc are all templates to divide an article about events in a certain year into obvious sections by topic.
[edit] Others
- Template:Climate can produce simple climate graphs for geography-related articles.
A template is a special type of page that has been designed so its content can be included in one or more other pages. Since a given template can be included in many pages, templates can help reduce duplication and promote a uniform style between pages.
Templates are usually located in the Template namespace, which means any page name beginning with Template:, such as Template:Name. However, any page can act as a template.
Referencing templates
The content of a template can be added to a page by referencing it using the wiki markup: {{templatename}}. This references the template and includes its output at the point of insertion. Articles will be updated automatically when referenced templates are changed. A page that references templates cannot be edited to change the content of a referenced template, although a list of referenced templates will be displayed at the bottom of the page for convenience while editing it.
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: {{subst:templatename}}. 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.
Benefits of templates
Templates are used to add recurring messages to pages in a consistent way, to add boilerplate messages, to create infoboxes and navigational boxes, and to provide cross-language portability of texts.
Templates can also make it much easier for new and casual editors to use advanced designs, features and extensions by hiding confusing code.
Creating a template
In short, create the text you want to have copied onto the target pages on a page in the Template namespace. Creating Template:Templatename will allow users to insert {{templatename}} into a page to display your text.
See Help:Creating templates for details.
For an overview, see the quick guide to templates on Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki.
Creating an advanced template
To learn how to change the output of the template based on what the user inputs, see Help:Template parameters and Help:Parser functions.
Updating and adding standard templates
Wikia's Starter Pages and Templates wikis occasionally improve some of their documentation as well as adding new templates specifically designed for Wikia sites, and are therefore worth checking from time to time. For sites created before about December 2008, the Starter Pages wiki should be compared and ideally used for upgrading to its standard documentation system similar to that introduced in Wikipedia.
