General Wiki Templates

[Senkusha]

I'm going to say this as a tech-savvy wiki newbie. This is a pain in the butt!

So, I've finally got a wiki added to my site. I'm using MediaWiki as my wiki engine, and I've played with this software a few times YEARS ago. Well, now I've got a serious project that I want to begin working on in conjunction with my forum. And it appears the best method for doing what I want to accomplish will be to use the idea of Templates. The problem is, as easy as this solution appears to be, it's not. I'm struggling with such an easy concept. Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand what it that I'm supposed to be doing, or as usual, I'm just over complicating this.

I've been going in circles for hours now. According to WikiMedia, it's possible to import templates (say from Wikipedia), and I thought, cool. I can use that as a base, and then modify my own version of the template rather than trying to figure out all the complicated formatting from scratch. But, it also appears that I need something called an InfoBox, and that's generated from an extension known as Scribunto.

I got to download and configure the extension, which seems straightforward enough, except, the copy/pasted code from Wikipedia isn't working, and I'm absolutely clueless as to what I've done incorrectly.

The code I got from Wikipedia is:

{{Infobox animanga character
 | color        = yellow
 | name         = Haruhi Suzumiya
 | series       = [[Haruhi Suzumiya]]
 | image        =
 | caption      =
 | first        =
 | creator      = [[Nagaru Tanigawa]]<br />[[Noizi Ito]]
 | voice    = [[Aya Hirano]] (Japanese) <br> [[Wendee Lee]] (English)
 | portrayer = [[Patricia Ja Lee]], [[Cristina Vee]] (''[[Haruhi Suzumiya#ASOS Brigade|ASOS Brigade]]'')
 | title        = {{Unbulleted list|Brigade Leader (SOS Brigade Rank)|Ultra Director (TV series credits)|Temporal Distortion (Future Humans)|Auto-evolution Possibility (Data Overmind)|God (Organization)}}
}}

But what I get is this:


Notice the link is in red, meaning that the page doesn't exist, but I thought I defined the Template, so it should be at least blue? Right? This is infuriatingly frustrating! Wiki's are supposed to be easy for users to add content, otherwise, sites like Wikipedia would have died a long time ago.

 

[Senkusha]

Okay. So WikiMedia has a built in Template maker thingy. I've tried doing that and this is what I get.


So, I'm really not sure what's not working. I'm not seeing any error messages either (as noted in the first screenshot).

 

[Senkusha]

Well, I can't figure this out. I'll just be duplicating a lot of text manually, because I guess the Template feature of Media Wiki is broken. I'm not finding anything using google, and there seems to be no support communities for Wikis.

 

[Senkusha]

Update: After talking with some people on Reddit, and looking all the documentation from a variety of sources with a fine-tooth comb, I discovered my issue, although I'm not using the InfoBox (I've decided to create my own formatting), the problem was that the TemplateData mechanism only creates a template for entering data. You still have to create the actual formatting for the template data (using plain text) and insert the parameters (variables) using triple curly braces.

Now for my next adventure: Hiding any parameters that aren't defined, because Default Value doesn't seem to do the trick.