Template:Orphan/doc

This template is applied and maintained by bots. It's not meant to be be used by human editors. The name of this template must never be changed.

Orphan merely puts category:Please add links to this page in other articles onto pages. This allows the creation of a list of pages that need to be linked to from other pages, in a similar fashion to that of Special:LonelyPages.

The category is not redundant to that special page, however. It has different advantages and drawbacks.

Advantages
Special pages rely on cached data that is only changed roughly once every 24 hours — sometimes, even longer. Categories tend to update much more quickly. Thus, this template creates, in one sense, a more dynamic list than the one generated by the special page.

Also, editors are more familiar with working with categories, and will more likely do something about the problem of orphaned pages if they're confronted with a message at the page level. Many new editors don't know of the existence of Special:SpecialPages, and are even less likely to know of the existence of Special:LonelyPages. It is hoped that directly-worded message at the page level will prompt more editors to do something about orphaned pages.

Disadvantages
While orphan is in one sense more dynamic than Special:LonelyPages, in another important way, it's not. Once you make a link to an orphaned page, it gets removed from Special:LonelyPages. It might take up to 72 hours, but it will eventually leave the list. By contrast, orphan remains on the pagee until it is removed. Nevertheless, the problem of a page being orphaned is more serious than the problem of a page that retains a message to add more links to it. And it's easy enough for a bot to completely strip the template from the wiki, and then reapply it, which results in a "resetting" of the category to only those pages that are currently orphaned.

Note for Wikipedia editors
Wikipedia editors will be familiar with wikipedia:template:orphan, from which this template derives its name. In most cases, when this wiki uses a wikipedia template name, it makes a straight copy of the template from Wikipedia, so as not to confuse our editors who come to us via Wikipedia.

However, this version of the template is entirely dissimilar to the Wikipedia version. It retains the same name only because the bot that uses it requires it to be called {[tl|orphan}}.

Why use a template for this?
Since this template merely puts a category on a page, there's an obvious question of why we'd bother using a template. Why not just add the category directly to the page?

Well, it's necessary to use a template because the bot, by default, applies a template. It's expecting the Wikipedia version of orphan, which is altogether more elaborate.

Also, if we place a template, we can later create something more elaborate with this template, and the changes will be refelected instantly across all pages that bear the template.