Wikispooks:Templates

Mediawiki's system of templates provides a convenient macro-language to allow efficient re-use of material and standardisation of presentation. This page assumes that you are already familiar with them and gives a quick overview of how they are currently used on WikiSpooks.

Single Issue Templates

Wikispooks has some content-specific templates (i.e. relating to a particular page or couple of pages), mostly of a fairly simple nature - i.e. a badge or a list of links. For example, Template:Snowden-Greenwald.

These are gradually being replaced by SMW-based approaches which have shown themselves easier to maintain and generalise upon, so Single Issue Templates are deprecated as of January 2014 - although they can still be used if available, it is not recommended to create any more. Use the discussion page to start a debate about this.

Semantic Templates

Full article: WikiSpooks:Semantic Templates

Wikispooks uses the Semantic Mediawiki extension to allow integration of machine readable with human readable content. This is done exclusively through so-called 'Semantic Templates' as opposed to those that only handle human readable text, layout information, images etc.

Parameters

Wikispooks template parameters should follow a standard of using all lower case for parameters. Multiple words are connected by underscore characters, e.g. "birth_date". This standard was fixed in June 2014, and some templates do not yet comply with the policy.