Global templates/Taxonomy

This is an attempt to write a simple taxonomy of templates used on Wikimedia wikis: what templates are used for and how can they be grouped.

Making a full list of what templates are used for is challenging, because there are literally hundreds of thousands of them. The list in this document will just show several common, notable families of templates, but because of the nature of the technology, it cannot be truly comprehensive.

A central technical consideration is that the proposed repository of Global templates will be usable for all the templates, no matter to which “family” they belong (on an opt-in basis: no templates will be forced to be stored in the global repository). The templates are practically the only tool that the wiki editors have for customizing the content efficiently, and “content” here means everything that is written in the wikis: encyclopedic articles, discussions, policy pages, help pages, essays, transcribed books, translations, and everything else. The proposed repository is for all these scenarios.

Unless noted otherwise, the examples here are from the English Wikipedia, but it’s crucial to note that this doesn’t mean that the English Wikipedia is, or should be, the “source” for all templates. This is simply done for convenience given the original language in which this page is written. In fact, there is a lot of technical innovation in template development in other languages, particularly French, German, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, as well as many others. Some of these are mentioned specifically in this document.

Summary table
Each row is described in more detail in further paragraphs.

General citations
“Basic” footnotes are inserted using an extension called Cite, and this works equally in all languages using the  tag in wikitext. The actual content of most citations, however, is formatted using templates. Citation style requires uniform formatting. The most notable English Wikipedia templates of this kind are Cite web, Cite book, and Cite journal. There are dozens of others, and they are used in almost all articles.