Forum:What is a template?

I'm always finding "Templates" on pages. My question is; What exactly is a template? I'm on this forum because there is no help pages about templates, so I'm asking any of you who knows what this is. (Yes, I know I'm an idiot for not knowing what a template is, but I'm new to this wiki. Or at least I am new to me.  To me, I'm still "new" to this wiki until I'm a Leaf Ranked user on this.)  I except ALL answers, even complaints about my over-activity on this wiki and stuff like that. --Pikpainter777 14:00, 25 August 2015 (EDT)Pikpainter777
 * You are not an idiot, that's a good question! Templates are a way of making information or code pre-made so that you don't have to copy and paste that information on every article. If you go into edit mode for in a specific template's page, you may see that it's a bunch of programming language, often including information in Mediawiki language and styles in CSS language. All that info is pre-made into a template, so that when you want it on a page, you just type . It saves a lot of space and a lot of unnecessary effort.


 * Now there are a lot of templates, and a lot of them are simply for userboxes. If you look at the page Category:Templates, you can view a list of them. If you need to organize information about an enemy into a box, or show a list of fanon games of which one page is a member, or let people know that an article is a stub or is under construction, there are templates here to help the message look organized and consistent across multiple pages. A great deal of templates have placeholder sections where you would input custom information. For example, in an infobox about a type of Pikmin, there would be a placeholder space for the particular resistance or attack power of that Pikmin; you would type it in when you include the template in a page. If you look up the specific page about a template (all templates have their own pages with the prefix "Template:" ), you can find how to type it into an article (make sure to follow the structure exactly, templates can be finicky about that) and you can see which areas are saved for custom information. Remember that not all templates are fine to use on any page; some templates are only to be used on the Main Page, for example.


 * I hope that answers your question. If you have any others, or if you have music/CGI requests, don't hesitate to ask on my talk page! Scruffy 17:15, 25 August 2015 (EDT)