Valfarly chanced upon wikipedia and thought "that'll never work"... but after using it a few times, he eventually got sufficently annoyed by a typo to do something about it and on 15th March 2004 hit edit. From there it was a slippery slope to writing articles for things he found no-one else had written about and adding tidbits, factoids and other nuggets of information to previously covered topics. Finds himself correcting spelling and grammar far too often!
Templates are a type of page that contain boilerplate text that is intended to be displayed on more than one page in Wikipedia.
This Tip of the day box is an example of a template (there are several versions actually), and besides being displayed here it is displayed on many userpages as well.
Template names start with the prefix "Template:" followed by the page name. The main version of the template you are reading right now is called "Template:totd".
To display a template on a page, go to the target page, click "edit", and add the template's name (with or without the prefix) surrounded by double curly brackets to the page's source text. (The text you see in the edit box when you click edit this page is called "source text", because it is a lot like programming code, which is called "source code").
Including a template on a page in this way is called "transclusion". Here's an example:
To include the Template:Philosophy topics, type this at the end of the philosophy article you wish to place it on::
The acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus) is a bird in the woodpecker family, Picidae. It is found across Central America, as well as the western United States and parts of Colombia. A medium-sized bird, it has a length of around 20 cm and is mostly black, and adult males have a red cap starting at the forehead and females a black area between the forehead and the cap. As their name implies, acorn woodpeckers are heavily dependent on acorns for food, which they store in small holes that they drill into trees, known as "granaries" or "storage trees". This acorn woodpecker was photographed in the grounds of California State University, Chico, United States.Photograph credit: Frank Schulenburg
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