Templates

Templates basically offer the possibility to include the articles from [[Template:]]-namespace into other articles by the means of transclusion. mw:Help:Templates is an excellent tutorial into MW templates.

The template system in MediaWiki has evolved to a very powerful (and complicated in some cases) system for avoiding redundant manual work, and enabling consistent structure for articles that deal with a certain, shared area of knowledge. Other features in MediaWiki include extensions, categories and extra namespaces and widgets

Templates in development wiki

There are a few templates in use in this wiki. A complete list is here with the only useful (and ones used) being:

Template:Deprecated - used to mark pages that are no longer relevant or coherent with current plans due to evolution of the implementation plan
Template:Fromwp - used to give credit when an article is adapted from Wikipedia
Template:Stub - a stadard stub message
Template:TFD - Tagged For Deletion - If someone want's to conserve contents from a page that has been tagged like this they either move all useful information to another article or improve the article so that it makes sense in the larger scheme of things.

Template use in Implementation wiki

Here we should compile a list of templates that will be useful in the implementation stage when we begin to assemble information about companies and products.

New infoboxen

Infoboxen can consist of standard items in the form of a large unified template with fields for value and freeform portion with mostly single item templates ( think of userboxen ).

Continent
Country
Area ( intra-country )

NGO
IGO ( Inter-Governmental Organization )

Nutrition facts label

Single item boxen

Single item boxen for products

All labels obviously ( vegetarian, [[halal], kosher, dolphin safe, no old growth... )

Single item boxen for people/users

Recycles
Uses mass transit

Templates to be copied from Wikipedia

w:Template:Prepared food makes sense to copy 1-to-1 this

Templates to be copied from other sources

Uncyc:Q ( quote )

Template use in Wikipedia, 2012 situation mapping

w:Category:Business infobox templates will likely almost all be included under GFDL to form the base data on entitites such as brands and businesses.

Using the SPARQL queries on DBpedia's datasets on Wikipedia infoboxes enabled by the LinkedWiki extension so we will start collecting a list of Infoboxes to get datasets for.

w:Template:Infobox company

{{Infobox company
| name             = 
| logo             = 
| caption          = 
| type             = 
| traded_as        = 
| genre            = <!-- Only used with media and publishing companies -->
| fate             = 
| predecessor      = 
| successor        = 
| foundation       = <!-- {{Start date|YYYY|MM|DD}} -->
| founder          = 
| defunct          = <!-- {{End date|YYYY|MM|DD}} -->
| location_city    = 
| location_country = 
| locations        = 
| area_served      = 
| key_people       = 
| industry         = 
| products         = 
| services         = 
| revenue          = 
| operating_income = 
| net_income       = 
| aum              = <!-- Only used with financial services companies -->
| assets           = 
| equity           = 
| owner            = 
| num_employees    = 
| parent           = 
| divisions        = 
| subsid           = 
| homepage         = <!-- {{URL|examplesite.com|ExampleSite.com}} -->
| footnotes        = 
| intl

w:Template:Infobox brand

{{infobox brand
| logo           = 
| name           = 
| image          = 
| type           = 
| currentowner   = 
| origin         = 
| introduced     = 
| discontinued   = 
| related        = 
| markets        = 
| previousowners = 
| trademarkregistrations = 
| ambassador     = 
| tagline        =
| website        = 
}}

w:Templates:Infobox advertising

{{Infobox advertising
| name     = 
| image    = 
| caption  = 
| agency   = 
| client   = 
| title    = 
| product  =
| product2 =
| product3 =
| year     =
}}

w:Template:Infobox prepared food

{{Infobox prepared food
| name             = 
| image            = 
| caption          = 
| alternate_name   = 
| country          = 
| region           = 
| creator          = 
| course           = 
| type             = 
| served           = 
| main_ingredient  = 
| variations       = 
| calories         = 
| other            = 
}}

Information on using templates on Meta

m:Help:Template

w:Wikipedia:Template_messages lists (most) of the templates used in Wikipedia in a user friendly way. All templates used in Wikipedia can be found here (an automatically generated alphabetically ordered list)

Some of Wikipedia's templates (such as those dealing with calendars and such) are directly applicable to the implementation wiki

Surfing around Wikipedia one encounters many complex templates that may include nested templates and parameters.

Template use in Wiktionary

Wiktionary's index to templates has some good explanations of the different kinds of templates used there and their application

See also