Manual:Creating pages with preloaded text

Preloading wiki text is one of many techniques for helping users create articles more quickly and for improving the quality of those articles. Instead of creating a blank article from scratch, users are presented with a partially created article, and possibly instructions for filling it in.

This technique is especially useful when:
 * wiki users are willing to read and write simple wiki text (sometimes an issue on intranet installations of MediaWiki)
 * the wiki contains one or more categories of articles with lots of pro-forma text
 * the information that needs to be collected for such articles is a mix of structured data and free form text

Creating articles with preloaded text is a three step process:
 * 1) Design the preload file and its supporting templates
 * 2) Create articles for the preload files and supporting templates
 * 3) Set up the trigger to load the preload file

Designing the preload file
The preload file is typically an article with an embedded template. For example, if you wanted one article for each customer or marketing contact, you might want to preload text that looks something like this:

Naming the preload file
Some extensions (see Extension:Boilerplate) have specific expectations as to where the preloaded text should be stored. Others leave that decision entirely up to the system administrator.

Choosing an article location takes some care because preload files don't always show up on "What links here" and so are at risk for accidental deletion (no info/no links - hard to tell from an article that got created and abandonned). For template based preload files, the following naming convensions may help avoid accidental deletion:


 * place template in
 * place preload file in

Loading the preload file
There are a number of extensions available to trigger your preload file:


 * Extension:Inputbox, Extension:CreateBox,Extension:CreateArticle offer the most control over the loading process. Each of these extensions let you place a button somewhere in an article, typically in a user help page or the category page corresponding to the article.  You specify the name of the preload file as part of the button definition.
 * Extension:BoilerplateSelection - preloaded text selected by pattern matching on article title. To set this up you create an array in your Manual:LocalSettings.php file.  This array associates regular expressions with preload article names.
 * Extension:Boilerplate - preloaded text for all articles irrespective of name or category. The preloaded text must be stored in the MediaWiki article  .  It will be loaded automatically whenever an article is created.

All in one extensions
A few extension also handle all three steps for you:


 * Extension:Add Article to Category - puts an add-an-article button on each category. When an article is created using this extension it will automatically contain the wiki text for including the article in that category, i.e.