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Wrapper templates are outer templates which wrap around simpler inner templates, to greatly extend the basic functionality of the inner templates. The concept is to structure the underlying, inner templates to be used as utility tools by various outer, wrapper templates. Templates can be wrapped to existing templates with Module:Template wrapper.
Experience has shown that, when the underlying templates have been restructured with a full set of options to be used, then numerous variations of wrapper templates have been created to extend template functionality with a broad variety of new features.
Wrapper templates can be useful for consolidation, as they allow templates to build off of each other, whereas copying and pasting templates can make them harder to maintain.