Help:Templates

Templates are a wiki feature that allows for complex formatting to be repeated over many pages. Many of these are provided by the MediaWiki software or its plugins, but the folks of the Minecraft Wiki have added many more, specialized to our purposes.

There are two human-compiled lists of templates: Basic templates and Advanced templates. These were created by a project for the purpose.

There is also a categorized list of templates found in Category:Templates and a complete list of templates at Special:PrefixIndex/Template:.

To use a template, the most basic way to use them is using {{Template}} on a page. Many templates have extra parameters which can define what they do.

Parameters need to be written usually this way: {{Template|Parameter|ParamterN}}.

For specific usage, it is preferred to go to the template page. For example, one can go to the {{wip}} template to see its documentation. Also, it is recommended to ask on the respective template's talk page any question that need to be solved, alongside suggestions to improve them and other things.

Templates need to follow a certain order:

1. Hatnotes. Always at the start of the article or section.
2. Message boxes. Always placed after the hatnotes.
3. Infoboxes. After the first two, if there is needed to use them.
4. Navboxes. They are placed at the final of the article, just before categories and interwikis.

There is available quite a lot of documentation out there about wiki templates describing how to create and use them.

A Quick Guide to Templates gives a brief introduction to the subject.

There are more detailed descriptions and how-to guides about creating and using templates as well as creating a template documentation.

A good source of information is also the official MediaWiki documentation for a basic and an advanced template usage.

Also, there can be found another external sources of information, e.g. this short guide or this help page.