Forum:Understanding templates on Wikia



Good morning!

We want to give you a sneak peek of a brand new feature we've been working on, which we're calling template classification. We want to hear what you think of it, and your feedback will help us decide how to develop this further!

Essentially, it involves giving each template a type such as 'infobox', 'navbox' or 'quote'. We are building easy ways to do this, while also working on automatic type detection that will likely cover a lot of cases - so it should require little work on your part.

By doing so, it helps give Wikia better information about what templates exist, and means we can provide a better experience for both readers and editors. For example, these buckets could be used within the editor to help users narrow their search by template type, and we could give Insights reports based on template type.

This is quite separate to template categories, since the usage of such categories vary hugely across Wikia - template classification and categories do not affect each other.

The feature is in the early stages right now, and we'd love to get your feedback on how it works, plus we'd love your thoughts on how this data could be utilized effectively on your community. (We're looking for new feature requests of how this could make organizing and using templates more powerful.)

To classify a template, you will see the feature under the article name on the template page and in the right rail of the editor when you're editing a template. Clicking the pencil icon will open the tool to select from the list of 11 options. We'll also show the feature when you create a new template.

The current template types are:
 * Infobox — Displays the most essential snippets of information about an article in a box, most commonly at the top right of an article page.
 * Navbox — Provides a list of organized links for readers to navigate to similar articles, most commonly at the bottom of an article page.
 * Quote — Highlights notable snippets of text, such as lyrics, book passages, or quotes.
 * Notice — Also known as tophats or alerts, these templates notify the reader about the status of the article itself, such as stub, disambiguation, or spoiler. (These roughly correspond to the flags feature items.)
 * Citation or reference — Organizes and standardizes the display how sources of content on an article page are annotated.
 * Image, video, or gallery — This template will standardize or modify the display of one or more images or videos.
 * This template is used to display data on an article page
 * This template is used to design or structure article pages
 * This template is used for navigation
 * This template is not used on article — This template will only be used on file pages, user pages, talk pages, etc.
 * I don't know

The feature has been enabled on your community today - please let us know your thoughts below! Kirkburn (talk) 17:09, October 29, 2015 (UTC)