Tutorial:AdvancedTutorialPage1e
I want you to make a template. This is a page that is automatically pasted into the page, by a process called transclusion. This can be useful, because now if you need to change something in the template, you just need make one edit (to the template itself), and all the pages containing that template are immediately updated!
A template can be a simple picture or short piece of text, or it can be a sophisticated piece of code (we'll see some of those later). Templates can be useful as shortcuts for routine operations, or as banners or navigational templates. Template:Chem395_navigation looks complicated, but it's simply a table set to align on the right of the page, and I used it for navigation around the wiki for my online course.
I put together a lot of this tutorial using templates, and the "coffee break" posting was an example. Why don't you award yourself 100 coffee break points?
- In your other window, go to your talk page , click edit and type {{coffee break}} (double curly brackets, above the square brackets). Save, and you should see the coffee break image come up in your talk page.
- What if you want to freeze the template with the current version? Go in and edit the last template entry to read {{subst:coffee break}}. The "subst" refers to substitution.
Then I'm going to start editing the template - see what changes come up! You can refresh the window to see the changes!
Then please WAIT before going on to the next page.
I would like to give you a quick demo of some of the things we can do on Wikipedia, which has many thousands of templates and hundreds of special tools, such as the AutoWikiBrowser. These are mostly specific to Wikipedia, though they are probably all available (open source) to use by a technically knowledgable person. I also want to show you the power of bots!
