Help talk:Templates

Should I add redirects with translated names to translated templates?

Note:Post is quoted from Valve Developer Community talk:About page.

So like for instance if a chinese person wanted to use Template:Confirm:zh-cn, it would likely be annoying to use it, as they would need to either copy paste english text or use an english keyboard to type in {{confirm:zh-cn}}, which not all chinese people want to do. If there was a template redirect page named simply Template:确认 that redirected to Template:Confirm:zh-cn, then chinese people would only have to type in {{确认}} to use the chinese confirm template.

In my opinion this would make it easier for chinese people to insert chinese templates. Right? - Amicdict (talk) 16:23, 15 September 2021 (PDT)

Makes sense to me. --Loudslappingsounds (talk) 23:21, 15 September 2021 (PDT)

When to Use What, Where?

most templates' documentation explains the mechanics of their usage pretty well, and most of the ones without documentation are pretty easy to figure out. what's less transparent, however, is how they should be used.
for example, I know how Template:Note works, 'cuz its documentation is quite clear. Template:ModernNote lacks documentation, but it's not hard to put two and two together. what is hard is knowing what the difference in purpose is.

• when should I use the "Modern" note templates, and when should I use the standard ones?

another example is topicon templates. I see them pretty often on Source 2-related pages, but nowhere else (though I then went and made some and have since been adding them where I thought they belonged). one especially confusing bit is that the game pages themselves don't seem to have the topicons, and neither do entity pages.

• where should topicons be used?
  • should they be used in relevant category and template pages?
    • or should they only be used in relevant category pages that function much like normal pages (e.g., Category:Level Design?)
  • should they be used in relevant entity pages?
  • should they be used on game/mod pages?

similarly, I'm unclear as to when game link templates should be used, especially ones like Game icons, Template:Game link (or {{New icon|2}}), and Template:Game name (or {{New icon|4}}). I get the impression that {{Game name}} holds more importance than {{Game link}}, and both are used (as with most links) primarily to introduce things, but I'm not entirely sure. I see the icons used a lot by themselves, but I often find this somewhat frustratingly vague, as some things have the same icons (e.g., and ).
relatedly, I'm somewhat unclear as to when titles/names should be italicized, put in quotation marks, or left bare. (I'm guessing {{Game name}} exempts it from any of these, but that aside…) I know that generally, names of works of fiction are supposed to be italicized (e.g., Portal 2 or Trollhunters); meanwhile, sections of such works are supposed to be quoted (e.g., "The Fall" or "Becoming: Part 1"), as are titles when italics are difficult/impossible. One gray area, though, is mods.

• when should {{Game link}}, {{Game name}}, game icons, quoted names, and italicized names be used in comparison to each other?
  • should {{Game link}} and {{Game name}} be used primarily to "introduce" games to a topic, the same way as with any topic relevant to an article?
  • is {{Game name}} supposed to be used for games considered more important to the topic? if so, what counts as "more important?"
    • predecessor games?
    • sequel games?
    • games in which the page topic is present (when it isn't present in all games)?
    • games in which the paragraph topic is present?
    • games in which a specific bug/quirk/whatever is present?
  • do mod names (as in, modifications to a game, as opposed to modifications to Source) get italicized, quoted, or neither? (e.g., is Dissonance, "Dissonance," "Dissonance," or Dissonance preferable?)
• when should {{Game name|icon=0}}/{{New icon|3}} (e.g., Portal 2), "bare" icons (e.g., ), and "bare" links (e.g., Portal 2) be used?
  • are "bare" icons supposed to be used before the first paragraph of a page pertinent to a specific game (as on Hard Light and most entity pages)?
    • are they the preferred form of game mention in inline note templates, like {{Bug}}?
  • are iconless Game Names only supposed to be used when a "bare" icon precedes the paragraph (as in the same examples)? or are there other use cases?
  • are "bare" links never supposed to be used for games/mods, since they should always have stylization/italics/quotes?

I know this is a lot. this website should probably have a style guide for this. I'd be willing to write it, but if I knew the answers to these questions, then uhh I wouldn't be asking them. -- Kestrelguy (talk) 17:48, 20 May 2022 (PDT)

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That's a lot of good questions. I think I can answer some. All of the following is my opinion and nothing I've read up.

Roughly speaking, if you're asking yourself which template or styling to use: if it does the job and it's consistent on the page, then it's good. So that leaves a lot of interpretation, but that isn't too bad I think. If there are new ideas, then it's good to find them on singular pages first and not across the entire wiki immediately. This might contradict the wiki's "everything should look like it's written by the same person" but honestly, this site isn't as relevant for the world as the "real" wiki. If you find a way to make it look cooler (while remaining faithful to the Etiquette!), then go ahead.

I really like the {{ModernNote}} templates but I'm also unclear about their use. On the one hand I can imagine that they have the potential to replace {{Note}} etc. but on the other they might grab too much attention. (Before it comes into use there should definitely be a base template for all of them - why not ModernNote itself - to make making changes a ton easier. I might do that next shortly)

Topicons? No idea, I'm not yet convinced of them. If I see a topicon on a page, telling me that the article is related to a specific game, then I will most likely already have seen a {{Game name}} style link in the first sentence thanks to its coloring.

So this gets me to game links in the style of {{Game link}} and {{Game name}}. First off, I don't use these two templates anymore because {{New icon}} (i.e. {{Hl2}} etc.) is less to type AND it is much simpler to add games. Next, I do not use plain links for games at all. The game color used by {{Hl2|3/4}} is really powerful for the reader to quickly see whether a topic relates to a specific game. You see the color? Bam, you're on the gear. Unless they're used too often. For a topic, I prefer to use the style {{Csgo|4}} for all related games once somewhere at the beginning and later on I use only the short version {{Csgo}} right before a statement that does not affect all of the games. If a different game needs to be mentioned that did not appear before with its color, then it depends which style I use. Usually I try to keep the number of colors and characters low, so I stick to just the icon, e.g. exec (however, on game pages I seem not to be like that). Otherwise, the {{Csgo|2}} or {{Csgo|in}} styles might come in handy.

The style 3 (like Team Fortress 2) is only useful if the game icon is already in the sentence. The only example I know are the {{Tf2 point}} templates etc.

Game icons not being unique (like and , as you mentioned) is a minor problem I think. Firstly, in the case of hls, there could simply be a distinct icon (which surely exists) and if even that is not possible then there is still {{Hls|2}} for distinction.

I hope this helped you at least a bit.

--Popcorn (talk) 03:43, 20 October 2022 (PDT)

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most of what you say makes sense though I personally don't like the ModernX templates. I guess in lieu of a style guide or similar, common sense and general purposes are the best we've got. partially, I think I was wondering if there was a style guide, and I just missed it.

I think I originally asked these questions before I fully understood the complete functionality of {{New icon}}? but yeah, I totally agree that there's essentially no point in using {{Game link}} or {{Game name}} unless you want to style up a mod that isn't worth its own template.

it doesn't answer all the questions (as you acknowledge), but it does help. not least because it shows I'm not just talking into a void

— Kestrelguy (talk) 15:11, 20 October 2022 (PDT)

Collapsible navboxes

I think it would make a lot of sense to have collapsible and even some collapsed by default navboxes.

Some like the ones listing 3rd party tools, and big game series, can benefit from collapsed state to save vertical space and make bottoms of pages look less busy.

(smaller series' navboxes don't look so busy to begin with, but to promote consistency, they should then also be collapsed by default. Like on Combine OverWiki or English Wikipedia.)

Others like {{VDC-navbox}} probably don't need to be collapsible at all. Although it's stacked, it's only on main and then technical pages.

I've checked Mediawiki documentation on navboxes and it wasn't very clear to me. It said something about collapse-related parameters or starting autocollapsed if it includes collapsible elements... but I didn't really get it.

Is any of this possible? Cvoxalury (talk) 09:34, 22 June 2024 (PDT)

 Yes: 

This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but haven't done because I've been obsessed with other ideas that are no longer relevant to this wiki. For example, I originally made the References template collapsed, because I was always annoyed by the pile of text at the bottom of even a simple page (I think that's a decision worth discussing).

I can add this to the template later if needed. Or you can play with mw-collapsible and mw-collapsed classes yourself.

--THE OWL 17:14, 22 Jun 2024 (UTC)

This needs to happen at some point. Pages like VHE are now a stack of navboxes that take half the page's height. I couldn't understand how to apply mw-collapsible/collapsed to the navbox class, as it doesn't seem to want to work with it, as navbox isn't a simple element like a table, so I stayed away from editing it. Chapter navboxes (which are really just tables) work fine with it, but they're not problematic enough to begin with. Cvoxalury (talk) 03:13, 29 June 2024 (PDT)

Internet Archive template, IA

We can use a template that would allow to easily insert Wayback Machine links, naturally there's a lot of lost tutorials and such preserved only there.

COW has its Template:IA, good example. (one note about it, 'archived' always leading to WP page on what Wayback is, tends to throw me off every now and then as I'd click on it thinking it's part of the archive link, so maybe it's not necessary to link to WP).

If it's going to have an '(archived)' then it won't really need an icon either.

I looked at the {{Wiki}} template and it's I'd rather someone more savvy do the tech side of it. Cvoxalury (talk) 03:53, 23 June 2024 (PDT)

Sounds pretty simple. I just made this template. I called it {{Wayback}} to better reflect the essence of this template when editing. If I missed something or did not fully understand you, feel free to write about it on the discussion page of this template. --Max34 (talk) 12:13, 23 June 2024 (PDT)