Wikipedia:Guide to Scribbling

This page in a nutshell: Scribbling is a way to create complex templates and is more robust than parser functions. A scribbled template consists of only {{#invoke:Name1|Name2}}, which invokes the script at Module:Name1, where the code is written. To get started, refer to Module:Example. Try the module by using Template:Basic scribbling example in your sandbox.

This is the Guide to Scribbling. Scribbling, also known as Luafication, is the act of writing a template, or converting a template, so that it uses the Scribunto extension to MediaWiki. The Scribunto extension^[a] was developed by Tim Starling and Victor Vasiliev, and allows for embedding scripting languages in MediaWiki. Currently the only supported scripting language is Lua. This Guide aims to give you a broad overview of Scribbling, and pointers to further information in various places.

Scribbled templates come in two parts: the template itself and one or more back-end modules — in the Module: namespace — that contain programs that are run on the wiki servers to generate the wikitext that the template expands to. The template invokes a function within a module using a new parser function named {{#invoke:}}.

The idea of Scribbling is to improve template processing performance. Scribbling eliminates any need for template parser function programming using parser functions such as {{#if}}, {{#ifeq}}, {{#switch}} and {{#expr}}. All of this is instead done in the module, in a language that was actually designed to be a programming language, rather than a template system onto which was bolted various extensions over time to try to make it into a programming language.^[b] Scribbling also eliminates any need for templates to expand to further templates and potentially hit the expansion depth limit. A fully Scribbled template should never need to transclude other templates.^[c]

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