Forum:Wiki Templates (Tlosk Jan 2009)
I've created a new help page, Wiki Templates that references several new formatting templates with more to come soon. The general idea of a template is it takes formatting code that is complicated and/or used in many articles and lets you refer to it rather than use it on every page. There are two benefits to this, one it makes posting simpler and second, it makes it possible to change the formatting for all those pages with a single edit to the template page rather than to all the individual pages.
These are different from Page Templates because they are used within a page for a part of it, rather a layout for an entire page.
There's no obligation to use them, and they aren't universally good, what you gain in ease of use, you give up in terms of being able to customize or stray from the format when you need to add things unique to that page. But overall templates help give the wiki a uniform feel, allow neophyte users to make complicated constructions, and minimize errors. --Tlosk 06:38, 24 January 2009 (CST)