I wrote a feature at Wikimania and forgot to announce it outside that
audience. It's live now on Wikimedia websites. The feature is the
ability to control template inclusion by the use of <noinclude> and
<includeonly> tags.
Anything between <noinclude> and </noinclude> will be processed and
displayed only when the page is being viewed directly, not included.
Possible applications are:
* Categorising templates
* Interlanguage links to similar templates in other languages
* Explanatory text about how to use the template
The converse is <includeonly>. Text between <includeonly> and
</includeonly> will be processed and displayed only when the page is
being included. The obvious application is:
* Adding all pages containing a given template to a category
Note that the usual update problems apply -- if you change the
categories inside a template, the categories of the referring pages
won't be updated until those pages are edited.
Beware of bugs: this hasn't been tested in a real wiki environment yet.
-- Tim Starling