Reply To: JoCo Concert Stats 2008
Okay, sounds like I can best help by explaining subst — in MediaWiki, you can embed page A into page B by transclusion, i.e. have page B “call” page A every time it’s loaded, or by substitution, i.e. paste the entire text of page A into page B. (Compare hotlinking an image vs. making a local copy — if you hotlink an image and it gets updated or changed, your page will show those updates, but if you make a local copy, it’s fixed and static.) The default is to transclude, but adding “subst” to the template call causes substitution instead. See Help:Template#Substitution for more on that. (I could’ve equally taken out the sub-template and just included “city”, “venue,” etc., things in the original template, but I thought, ironically, it’d be less messy this way.)
The fields in the subtemplate (Shows Template) aren’t in any particular language, they’re just Wiki-template parameters. More or less, they say, “Print a line if the template was given a location, print a line if the template was given a date, etc.”
That help any? Let me know if I can clear anything else up.