Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-1155275-20160202135905/@comment-24473195-20160202141351

Templates have pretty much lost their meaning on wikis. They  are (ab)used for just about any nonsense. I've seen wikis using templates for enforcing a particular layout on most pages. That makes it particularly complicated to edit, and has an unnecessary number of parameters. This is partly the result of ignorance and partly the result of attempting to create simpler pages.

That being said, front page templates are sometimes used to simplify the markup or make the front page more readable. Then again front pages tend to be locked by admins, so it doesn't particularly matter that much.