TranslateWiki:Templates/en

This project works a little different with templates than usual wikis. A lot of templates will be localized in different languages in subtemplates. Others serve as basic layout to be localized on the various pages of the wiki. Read this page to understand the important and common templates, and how to use them.

Formatting and documenting templates
A lot of templates show by default in English, but most serve to be localized. This is usually done by either of the following ways:
 * a MediaWiki message that has to be manually added to MediaWiki namespace by an administrator.
 * putting the translatable text as parameters and creating subtemplates per language.

You can usually recognize which one it is by looking at the template code. If  is there, it is a MediaWiki message. If not, it should be subtemplated, which you can double-check by adding  to the end of your URL to see the English-only version.

Documenting templates goes as follows:
 * Documentation is placed in the  subpage.
 * Documentation must be written in English by default. If the template is language-specific, it must however be written in the template's language.
 * If a template is a subtemplate without parameters (e.g. individual quotes such as Template:Quote/3), it gets no documentation.

In the case of complicated templates, the documentation itself can be translated in several languages as well. In this case, the base documentation is in the language of the template (English or other). The language suffix (e.g. ) will be added after. Example:
 * Template:Templatename (template)
 * Template:Templatename/doc (documentation)
 * Template:Templatename/doc/de (German documentation)