Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 12, 2008

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 {{Page name}}, but leave out the prefix between the curly brackets!.

On Wikipedia, templates are created to serve a variety of purposes, such as navigation boxes (e.g. Template:Europe), 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 can make one in your 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 prefix: {{User:Foo/something}} rather than {{something}}. This is because the curly-bracket syntax automatically looks in the Template namespace, so if you want to use one from your userspace, you need to tell it to look there.