Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 12, 2009

How to create reusable boilerplates

Pages intended to be reused as portions of other pages are called templates. The names of template pages start with the prefix Template:. A template can be included on another page using the syntax  , but leave out the Template: prefix between the curly brackets!

On Wikipedia, templates are created to serve a variety of purposes, such as navigation boxes (e.g. Template:Europe topic), infoboxes, and notices (e.g. Template:Controversial).

If you wish to make a personal boilerplate (such as a personalized welcome message, or the like), you make it in your own userspace. Simply create the page as a subpage of your userspace (in the format User:Foo/something). To put it onto a page, use the curly brackets as usual, but remember to use the syntax rather than. This is because the curly-bracket syntax automatically looks in the Template namespace, so if you want to use one from your own userspace, you need to tell it to look there.

Read more: Template

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