Template talk:Wiki

How does one use this template?

I have a private wiki that I want listed here:

• Category:Flat list of all wikis

But I have little understanding of how to use this template. There is no documentation or explanation. For example; I do not understand the use of {{{triple brackets}}}. I think I figured them out a little once while working on my wiki's main page, but since I so rarely use triple brackets I have since forgotten.

I picked a wiki at random from the above-linked category: Art and Games. Can someone explain all the parts in the wikitext? --Timeshifter (talk) 09:21, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Triple curly braces are basically "template variables". The official MediaWiki documentation on templates has some more info about it (remember that double curly braces are used to invoke either a template or a magic word).

There isn't much documentation on how to use this template because the single biggest user of this template is the automated wiki creation script (via User:ShoutWiki) and it knows how to use the template. ;-) Of course you're more than free to manually add a description page for your (semi-)private wiki, but generally speaking most people intentionally want to keep their private wikis "off-record", so to say.

That being said, here are the field descriptions:

name — the wiki's name

subdomain — the wiki's subdomain, i.e. foo in foo.shoutwiki.com

logo — full path to the wiki's logo image; if not supplied, File:ShoutWikiLogo.png is used instead

logo-width — width of the logo image in pixels; defaults to 155px

logo-bgcolor — background color of the logo image; defaults to #ffffff (=white)

language — the ISO 639-1 language code representing the wiki's content language; usually, but not always, two letters long

requester — the wiki's creator's (founder's) username

date — the wiki's foundation date in a human-readable format; for example, April 05, 2013

domain — if a wiki uses its own domain name instead of a subdomain.shoutwiki.com one, this is the full URL (protocol included) to the wiki. For example, we have had an encyclopedia of [[magnets]], available at http://www.encyclopedia-magnetica.com

description — founder-supplied description of the wiki and its contents

category — one of the categories listed at MediaWiki:Createwiki-category-list that the founder picked when they were creating the wiki

As you can see, the description page is initially populated by the data the founder has to supply when creating a wiki. This doesn't mean that it's perfect and shouldn't be changed! For example, a wiki can belong into multiple content categories (such as Category:Gaming, Category:Movies and Category:Television, for example), even if you can only pick one of them when creating the wiki via our wiki creation wizard. --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 19:24, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed info, and the help link. The help link is very useful: mw:Help:Templates#Parameters. I now need to try out the template for listing my private wiki. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:57, 1 January 2014 (UTC)