Editing Philosophical Research:MediaWiki and functional programming (section)

== Templates and Ontology entries ==

Each Item or Term entry on this wiki (these are pages within the Ontology: and Term: namespaces) contains a resident Template, generally always parked at the top of the page. These Templates are used to reference that Item or Term in data tables or numbered lists on other pages. This means that whenever [[E:PPPA|the main outward-facing label]] of an Item changes, it will automatically be updated on every single other page that uses it, and if the Template contains multiple languages, it may be able to automatically display the title in another language based on the language set on the page which is calling it. (This localization feature is not well tested or implemented currently.)   <!-- en-GB: localisation -->

Currently, the top Template inside each Item page is more or less unique to each page. The goal is for this to eventually not be the case, and for all pages to use one particular Template to define their top Template. Currently, the structure of resident Templates is slowly evolving each time a new page is created through various pages copying the best versions of each sub-section of the Template from each other. The [[Template:WaveScore|WaveScore Template]] is the first real "success story" on this, as it is one of the few parts of the top Template that has stabilized early on and then hardly changed. The second partial success story is the [[:Category:I-Templates for Item swatches|Item icons]] — while not every single ideology which has been given a swatch color and two to three letter code has an icon template, the useful MediaWiki feature of subpages quickly made the syntax for specifying swatch colors and icon markup solid. A few pages contain a demo of a single unified Item-Template Template, but this is not being widely used yet in case it ends up with bugs. Very early on, there was an attempt to design a unified Item template before creating enough pages, and for certain reasons this ended up with a lot of buggy pages where on every single page the Template had to be replaced with manual markup to start the process of making the Template over again, so this time around the process is now going more gradually with a careful use of alternate options and backwards compatibility. As much as this may make Template pages a little harder to read and interpret, it is strictly necessary for splitting up work into tiny increments to prevent having to change thousands and thousands of pages all on one day.