Wikipedia:Avoid template creep

Template creep (also known as creeping templatitis) is the tendency for some Wikipedia articles (and talk pages) to become gradually cluttered with templates. While templates are intended to provide useful features and simplify the editing process (indeed, many are now vital to the functioning of Wikipedia), their overuse can violate the KISS principle (upheld in Wikipedia policy nuggets such as avoid instruction creep and ignore all rules), create a barrier to editing for newcomers, and may also infringe on what Wikipedia is not. Always keep in mind the scope of Wikipedia when adding new features or functionality to it in the form of ingenious templates.

Template creep should be avoided in general, but specific cases should be judged on their own merits according to the pertinent policies and guidelines. As of July 16, 2007 there were 94,631 pages in the template namespace, excluding redirects. Many of these are redundant, replicating functionality with only minor variation.

Always ensure that templates are categorized and named appropriately or intuitively to facilitate their proper use.

Steps to take

 * improve and standardize templates to reduce clutter, ease navigation, and simplify the editing process
 * remove inappropriate, excessive, or trivial inclusions of otherwise worthy templates
 * delete redundant and inappropriate templates (at Templates for deletion)

WikiProject Templates is a project to manage the template namespace. The following are some more specific examples of efforts to standardize, "wrap", or shrink excessive/cluttering templates. Such measures can assist in reducing or mitigating the effects of template creep, but they should not be used merely to hide or excuse template creep. Note that the use of new templates to manage or "skip past" other templates can itself be a form of template creep, as would creating a template message for articles suffering from template creep.


 * cleanup and maintenance: Template:Articleissues
 * talk pages: Template:WikiProjectBanners, Template:WikiProjectBannerShell, Template:ArticleHistory, Template:Multidel, Template:Oldafdmulti, Talk page templates
 * navigation: Collapsibility and standardization of Navigational templates, standardization of football (soccer) navigational boxes and succession boxes.

Navigational template creep
The images to the right are examples of the proliferation of "navigational templates" in Wikipedia articles. These examples are from sports-related articles, but the same problems can be found in many kinds of articles on Wikipedia.

In these examples, some of the templates seem to be useful, but they increase the visual size of the article far out of proportion to the importance of the information they provide, and may not provide any substantial, relevant information at all beyond what is already in the article text. Some should be kept and made to collapse by default. Some should be removed/deleted as trivial, or replaced with categories, lists, or the pertinent facts included in the running text.