Help:Using article templates
From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.
The very nature of a wiki is that it is unlimited to all contributors. For this very reason, there is very little standardization within the wiki format. However, in some cases, some people believe that it is useful to have some form of standardized appearance in a wiki. For this purpose, we have created a series of article templates to help guide the creation of new pages for specific subjects.
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[edit] When should I use a template?
In general, the templates are created mainly for the organization of those articles that have a relatively high "information density."
Note that it is NOT important to fill in every portion of a template if that information is not known. It's better to leave blanks for inclusion later on, or just remove the entry if it's impossible to know that data.
The other case for using templates is when one article is part of a whole series of articles on the same basic subject – for instance, the episode guide pages. In these circumstances, using a template is beneficial because it creates a familiar appearance, so that a reader can easily recognize that the page he or she is looking at is for an episode (or movie).
[edit] When should I not use a template?
If you're creating a new page, and starting to use a template, but find that a lot of your entries for that template's table are "unknown" or "not applicable," it's probably best to not use any template, but write a straight article instead.
