 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
Templates on Wikipedia can be used for a variety of purposes. Some common uses for templates include infoboxes to summarize the information presented in an article, while others are information messages.
Templates are created in the Template: namespace, which means that a fictitious template called Shelf would be located on page http://en.wikipedia.orgview_html.php?sq=&lang=&q=Template:Shelf. In this way, template names do not conflict with the names of articles, images, and other elements on Wikipedia.
Template names are added to pages inside double curly brackets. In addition, user-typed parameters are allowed, so that the template has some input to work with. The parameters allow the templates to be tailored to the specific needs of different articles and pages. When the page is previewed or saved, the result or output of the template will be found in place of the template code.
A typical page entry for a template with two parameters takes the form:
{{TemplateName|Parameter1|Parameter2}}
or using named parameters:
{{TemplateName|a=Parameter1|b=Parameter2}}
For the discussion below we will make use of a popular template: {{current}}. The former code for {{current}} is shown in the block below:
{| class="messagebox current" style="width: auto;"
| [[Image:Current event marker.svg|50px| ]]
| '''This {{{1|article}}} documents a [[Portal:Current events|current event]].''' <br />
<small>Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.</small>
|}{{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}|<!-- don't categorize -->|[[Category:Current events]]}}<noinclude>
==See also==
*[[Template:Current-related]]
*[[Template:Current-section]]
[[Category:Temporal templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]
</noinclude>