Board Thread:Templates/@comment-188432-20140814180431

If you have a number of templates in the same part of an article — I'm thinking here mostly of navboxes at the bottom of pages — it's a good idea to keep it super simple. Just listing them at the bottom of a page is a good idea, like this:

Though that's probably the best idea — because other editors can see precisely what's on the page — it might be a good idea to template all those templates together, and then put a single template on the bottom of the page. Whichever way you go, though, you want to make sure — particularly if your templates go the whole width of the page — that they are not in any kind of table structure.

Recently, at the A.F.C. Wimbledon page i cane across this code:

Though this could be made to work, it's wholly unnecessary to put it within a table structure. Indeed, doing so created problems, largely because didn't have a pipe (|) in front of it, and was therefore not on a row of its own. (And there were other issues within itself.)

Instead, it's a much better idea just to do this:

Nothing fancy, nothing complicated. Just one template right after the other. And you should also make sure that doesn't create a table, either. It's just not necessary, and it opens you up to a lot of syntax errors that can wreck a page's design.

In short, keep it simple, and be very wary of any template which includes sub-tempaltes that contain the words "start" or "end". Templates like and  create table structures, but because they're not explicit on the template or article page, you're never immediately sure what their code is. I know that this kinda code is present all over Wikipedia, but remember that Wikipedia has teams of editors who specialise in templates. You don't have that luxury here, so it's best to keep the top and bottom of a table on the same page or template as the body of the table. It just makes diagnosing problems a lot quicker! 