Template:Countries of Africa

Note: This template is used on a lot of pages. In order not to put too much load on the servers, edits should be kept to a bare minimum. Please discuss proposed changes on the talk page first. Afterwards, changes can initially be done at and tested with Template:Countries of Africa/sandbox. Editing a template causes all pages that use the template to be re-rendered. If the template is used often, this can put a lot of load on the servers since it fills up the job queue. Keep in mind that templates that are used on file description pages also show up on other wikis.

This documentation is transcluded from Template:Countries of Africa/doc.

Displays a navigation box with links to similar galleries or categories for every country in a region. Links to existing pages are displayed using country names in the current user's language. Country names are obtained from Wikidata. If the name of a country is incorrect, find the country in this list and use the link in the Item column to check what changes have occurred at Wikidata.

{{Countries of Africa|prefix=:Namespace:Prefix text|suffix=suffix text}}

The following templates are implemented by Module:Countries:

For example, {{Countries of Africa}} contains:

{{#invoke:Countries|main|Africa}}

The parameter Africa means data from Module:Countries/Africa is used. Changes to the countries or the text displayed are made in the data module.

Before updating the main data module, changes should be made in the sandbox data module and tested with the sandbox template:

For example {{Countries of Africa/sandbox}} just contains:

{{#invoke:Countries/sandbox|main|Africa}}

And it uses the sandbox version of the associated data module, used by Module:Countries/sandbox (which is the sandbox version of Module:Countries).

Displaying the sandbox version of a template also allows testing changes in Module:Countries, without modifying the template or its associated data module (which don't need to be changed in their sandbox version).

The following two examples below allow testing changes made in the sandbox before applying working modifications to the normal version. This should work as intended and will finally display the same thing between the normal and sandbox versions of the template (and of their associated data module) once these versions are synchronized.

• {{Countries of Africa/sandbox|prefix=:Category:}}
• {{Countries of Africa|prefix=:Category:}}

See more examples in the testcases listed above for the normal version with their rendering to compare the results in the sandbox version.

If an invalid parameter is used, an error message is displayed when an edit to the page is previewed. If a page with an error is saved, no message is displayed but the page is added to a hidden error tracking category: Category:Countries template with invalid parameters.

For example the following code misspells the expected suffix parameter (For this demonstration, no tracking category is added because |nocat=yes is used).

{{Countries of Africa|prefix=:Category:Maps of|sufix=by region|nocat=yes}}

Previewing an edit on any category or gallery page, with such code added (not on this documentation page!) shows the result and the following message Error: invalid parameter "|sufix=by region" will appear. You can fix it by editing the code in your edited page.