Naming conventions for templates
The purpose of this page is to record and explain our current practices for naming units and pages. It's not a set of rules that you have to learn. If you want to create a page that doesn't exist, just create it. Don't worry about whether it has the right name. We can easily move it later.
These are new conventions introduced in July 2015. You will see lots of references in page source code to old names of templates that don't conform to these conventions, but you should use the new names when adding templates to pages or creating new templates.
Templates should have descriptive names where possible, but the names shouldn't be too long.
There is usually a space between each word in a template name.
Names are in lower case except for:
- the first letter of a template name is case insensitive.
- proper nouns should be capitalized: "James", not "james".
- acronyms and initials should be all capitals. For example: "AWM", "TNA".
Exceptions
Some templates don't conform to these conventions for special reasons:
- {{wo95import}} and {{DiscoveryData}} are only ever added to a page automatically, and appear on very many pages. Updating them is a low priority.
- {{Pageref}} and {{RefLives}} might be obsolete soon.
- {{BritishBrigade}} will be obsolete once level names are finalised.
- {{Longitem}}, {{UF-hcard-org}}, and {{WPMILHIST Infobox style}} are imported from Wikipedia and should keep their existing names.
