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 | This page in a nutshell: We have templates. They're great. Don't use them when you don't need to. |
Templates are a very useful tool here on Wikipedia. They allow us to take something that needs to appear on several pages, either in a static way (meaning it stays the same all the time) or a dynamic way (meaning it changes sometimes, or even frequently).
Sometimes we can get lazy, however, and tired of having to use some of the same formatting over and over, and so we create "template formatting" or "template lines" or things of the like. If you substitute your templates into your working articles, nobody's likely to ever know right?