Help:Using article templates

The very nature of a wiki is that it is unlimited to all contributors. For this very reason, there is very little standardisation within the wiki format. However, in some cases, some people believe that it is useful to have some form of standardised appearance throughout a wiki. For this purpose, we have created a series of article templates to help you when creating new pages for specific subjects.

When should I use a template?
In general, the templates are created mainly for the organisation of articles that have a relatively high "information density".

Note that it is NOT important to fill in every portion of a template if that information is not known. It's better to leave blanks for inclusion later on, or just remove the entry if it's impossible to know that data.

The other case for using templates is when one article is part of a whole series of articles on the same basic subject, such as pages about FTL characters. In these circumstances, using a template creates a familiar appearance, so that a reader can easily recognise that the page is part of a series.

When should I not use a template?
If you're creating a new page, and starting to use a template, but find that a lot of your entries for that template's table are "unknown" or "not applicable," it's probably best to not use any template, but write a straight article instead.