Warcraft Wiki:Template guidelines

Guidelines
AddOn pages API pages Assume good faith Archival Be bold! Citation Disambiguation Fan fiction Images	Manual of Style Renaming Signatures Subpages Talk pages Templates Text removal Wikiquette Welcoming
See also: policies, administrators

This page is considered a guideline on Warcraft Wiki. It illustrates standards of conduct, which many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy. Feel free to update the page as needed, but please use the voting process and put the vote on the discussion page to propose any major changes. See the Guidelines home page for an overview of Warcraft Wiki guidelines. See Category:Guidelines for a list of proposed and accepted guideline articles.

These guidelines describes clean, descriptive usage for templates in Warcraft Wiki. The usage described here is a guideline and can be overridden where circumstances warrant it. These guidelines will never be unerringly perfect for every situation. However, please try your best to keep to the advice outlined in this article so others may use your edits as an example when creating and editing their own templates.

Categorization

There are quite a few categories for templates. Categorize templates in the category with the narrowest definition.

Documentation

Templates should be constructed and documented in International English (that is, English without use of words which have different meanings in certain cultures). Document your template using the {{documentation}} template.

All parameters of the template which are not standard should be documented.

Functionality

Generalization

Single templates which can perform multiple similar functions are preferred to multiple similar templates which perform one function. In any given template, accept as many variations on a parameter as possible; e.g., make your parameter values case insensitive.

Named parameters should be used as much as possible; avoid numbered parameters except as a default for when values for the named parameters are not supplied to the template. This aids others in using the template.

HTML syntax

Use XHTML 1.0 Transitional syntax in templates (and everywhere else on the wiki). Avoid use of the HTML id parameter in templates as templates can be used more than once on a page.

Ifexist

The parser function {{#ifexist}} should be used as infrequently as possible.

Looping

Looping is very difficult to accomplish in MediaWiki templates without extensions (which Warcraft Wiki does not have). Templates should refrain from doing so whenever possible, and let the user repeat the template as needed.

Standard parameters

These should be used as standard names and usages for parameters which are commons used in templates.

{{{doc}}}

For templates which auto-categorize pages, use the following syntax to avoid categorization of the template itself or any pages that document the template:

{{{doc|[[Category:<auto-categorized category>]]}}}

This will allow users of the template to specify the doc parameter as blank and thus avoid categorization.