Help:Formatting Templates

Formatting Templates are MediaWiki templates that have been created to make it easier to express certain things, or to describe features of an article or section. There are several categories of templates that you may wish to use:

Information Boxes

These templates create the offset boxes that describe an article in some way. They are:

• Template:Infobox feature: These denote articles that describe an OpenGL feature, often one that was originally born as an extension. It has options for an entire array of history for that extension, from vendor-specific to the current version of the core that it is in.

Admonitions

Admonitions are paragraphs that are offset from the main flow of the text, usually to indicate a notification of some kind. There are several admonition templates. They all take one unnamed (positional) parameter: the paragraphs of text to offset.

• Template:Note: Used for general notes.
  • Template:Legacy note: Used for notations that are specifically about deprecated and removed functionality, or simply old extensions or behaviors that may no longer be applicable for modern use. The text in these admonitions is not for current hardware or current core OpenGL versions.
• Template:Warning: Used for warnings; typically specific "gotchas" that a user may encounter.

Alerts

Alerts are templates that specify that something is wrong with a section or article. These should be used with care, and they should always be coupled with a discussion on the appropriate talk page. And you should only ever use them if you do not have the time/knowledge to fix the problem yourself.

• Template:Cleanup: Used when a section or article has formatting that is in need of repair. Do this only when you don't have the time/knowledge to repair it yourself.
• Template:Inaccurate: Used when a section or article contains substantial factual inaccuracies. Only use this if you don't have the time/knowledge to repair it yourself.
• Template:Missing: Used when a particular section or article contains substantial on-topic information that is missing, and without links to pages where that information is adequately described. Use this only if you don't have the time/knowledge to repair it yourself.

Miscellaneous

These are useful templates, but don't fall under a general category.

• Template:Main: Use this at the top of a section if that section is a short description for something that has a longer, more indepth article.
• Template:Deprecated: Used when a section or article is covering material that has been deprecated and removed in the current core version of OpenGL. It looks like an Alert, but it isn't.