Template:Hatnote

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This template formats text into the standard stylistic for a Wikipedia hatnote. It produces a short note placed at the top of an article to provide disambiguation of closely related terms or summarise a topic, explaining its boundaries. Hatnotes look like this:

Example hatnote text.

Function

This template is primarily used to add a correctly formatted hatnote to a page. Often, but not always, this is a disambiguation link at the top of article pages. It places an HTML div- / div block around the text entered as its only argument, which provides standardized formatting (contents are indented and italicized in most displays); it also isolates the contained code to make sure that it is interpreted correctly.

This template is also used as the "meta-template" for additional specialized disambiguation link templates; see Category:Hatnote templates for a list.

The template does not automatically create links of any kind. Links and other desired formatting must be explicitly added, using normal Wikipedia markup.

Usage

Basic usage

{{hatnote|text}}

All parameters

{{hatnote|text|extraclasses=extra classes|selfref=yes|category=no}}

Parameters

This template accepts the following parameters:

• 1 - the hatnote text. (required)
• extraclasses - any extra CSS classes to be added. For example, the {{see also}} template adds the classes |extraclasses=boilerplate seealso.
• selfref - if set to "yes", "y", "true" or "1", adds the CSS class "selfref". This is used to denote self-references to Wikipedia. See Template:Selfref for more information.
• category - if set to "no", "n", "false", or "0", suppresses the error tracking category (Category:Hatnote templates with errors). This only has an effect if the first positional parameter (the hatnote text) is omitted.

Example

• {{hatnote|Example hatnote text}} →
  Example hatnote text

Errors

If no hatnote text is supplied, the template will output the following message:

If you see this error message, it is for one of four reasons:

1. No parameters were specified (the template code was {{hatnote}}). Please use {{hatnote|text}} instead.
2. Some parameters were specified, but the hatnote text wasn't included. For example, the template text {{hatnote|extraclasses=seealso}} will produce this error. Please use (for example) {{hatnote|text|extraclasses=seealso}} instead.
3. The hatnote text was specified, but that text contains an equals sign ("="). The equals sign has a special meaning in template code, and because of this it cannot be used in template parameters that do not specify a parameter name. For example, the template code {{hatnote|2+2=4}} will produce this error. To work around this, you can specify the parameter name explictly by using 1= before the hatnote text, like this: {{hatnote|1=2+2=4}}.
4. You tried to access Module:Hatnote directly by using {{#invoke:hatnote|hatnote|text}}. Use of #invoke in this way has been disabled for performance reasons. Please use {{hatnote|text}} instead.

If you see this error message and are unsure of what to do, please post a message on Template talk:Hatnote, and someone should be able to help you.

Pages that contain this error message are tracked in Category:Hatnote templates with errors.

Technical details

The HTML code produced by this template looks like this:

• <div class="hatnote">hatnote text</div>

The code is produced by Module:Hatnote.