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If you’ve been reading some of my other Collaboration Corner posts, it’s probably easy to recognize that I’ve been using the Unused Templates script pretty often lately. If you haven’t noticed, I have been.

However, over the summer it was brought up that we needed to update our UIBs. Displaying the UIBs on some pages caused UIB border lines not to be somewhat equal and things just didn’t jive on newer browsers - some on Mozilla Firefox and some on most of the other browsers. However, this brought to mind some additional information.

Some people know how to use a UIB. However, others don’t - even those who end up creating them. Can I start first with: What’s causing you from adding it to your page? We have instructions on adding a UIB to your page found Add UIBs to a wikiHow Page .

This got me thinking, some UIBs have instructions on how to use them right on their page while the majority of them don’t. Wondering about your take on this. I’ve gone through 38 of the 40+ UIB categories and added the usual UIB use formatting wiki text. If this is what’s easiest for you and what’s causing you from leaving created UIBs from being used, I’d like to know. But that spurs into my other ideas that are very related to this: the creation of subpages geared to the use of UIBs (to help pull UIBs off the Unused Templates page) and hope that others find these pieces. You can read about that here.

Now, these mentions of “fixes”, cause two troubles. In the past, I’ve asked some Community Moderators who’ve said the addition of use-information is optional. However, to keep things the same across the board (so we don’t run across times when people run the issues the same way) in newly created articles), it might be necessary that we change this in the Create UIB… article to read that this is somewhat mandatory across the board now.

And as for the addition of the UIB to be added on any possible page ( later), we should add steps on how to add those UIBs to these subpages, because this current system of finding UIBs is completely wonky.

Now, if you think that if you weave the link to the UIB onto your page this will fix the Unused Templates - right? Nope. It takes fewer characters but a few more keystrokes to get it to add and use. But I want to know would going about these steps help everyone?

Now, who uses the Unused Templates script, and what is causing some user’s not using it? It’s currently very helpful in finding templates that haven’t been used on pages. If you want to learn about this script, you can actually see the script here , but the numbering changes daily as the script updates only once daily, so any numbering could be off by the time you find the UIB.

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Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this post, but with everything that went on since the day I posted this (both medically and technologically), things have taken a turnaround. I’ve added all the intro use information present on as many templates as I could find (and didn’t have full-protection on, like only one UIB), and over the last three days I created all the subpages containing these UIBs on their own pages of the top-level wikiHow:Templates - all of them available at the second level page starting here , however, I know there’s more that may come about, because I don’t know the full extent of this problem and how well these pages and subpages are going to be received.

Using them this way, got them off the Unused Templates page - pretty quickly. However, it’s something to watch out for that will be rectified in a later fix to our Create UIB article, because while it’s not too typing-heavy, not very many people are yet aware that this page exists and some people actually think that adding these use statements are optional - when they are clearly are mandated to ensure a good user experience of receiving all the possible options - and something I guess we’ll have to go through on a yearly-check basis - but more on this at another time - probably some time next year.

As for the other subpages of wikiHow:Templates , I went through and added most of the other templates, and even created more subpages for those too. There were a few where the topics involved were too old to display, and even if you did run across them, it wouldn’t hurt to know that they exist. These too will need to be double-checked in a year or so to ensure we’re up to date - but I guess we should be or will be dying to try to be.