The commons tempkate "Information" and all its derivates need parameter values for <code>date</code> and <code>author</code>.
Parser functions or magic words to generate these values wuld be very helpful.
Currently some users take "<code><nowiki>~~~~~</nowiki></code>" as a workaround for the date; but this needs correction because a date consist of year-month-day and is not a timestamp which has also the time of the day.
For the author a valid user name is needed, and not a signature as created by <code><nowiki>~~~</nowiki></code>; nevertheless some users take it as a workaround, because no better possibility exists. But it makes more troubles and needs cleanup, because an author can be a wikipdia user but not his talk page.
Impressive names for these functions may be e.g. ~date and ~user, or ~~~d and ~~~u.
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