Help:Add Babel templates

A Babel template is a specialized form of the userbox, which allows users to provide some information about the languages they use and their level of proficiency, in their user pages. The use of these templates also puts the user in appropriate language categories, so other users can find them.

This makes it much easier to find users with whom you can communicate, which is important on global projects like Wikia which caters to many different languages. The templates were first created and used on the multilingual wikis Meta-Wikipedia and Commons, and were named after the Tower of Babel.

For example, a user who is fluent in English and can use it as a native speaker would use the template  on his or her Community Central user page, or   when using it as a shared template on other Wikia. The template would look like this:

What language levels are used?
The templates are in the format  where "language" is the two/three letter code for the language. (See ISO 639 if you don't already know it.) When no level (or the letter N) is specified, it indicates someone is fluent at the level of a native speaker. The levels of ability are: For example, :
 * xx-0 the user does not understand this language
 * xx-1 for basic command (the ability to understand and answer simple questions in the language)
 * xx-2 for an intermediate level of knowledge
 * xx-3 for advanced or fluent understanding (the ability to correct spelling and grammar errors in the language)
 * xx or xx-N for native or equivalent

How do I add Babel templates to my user page?

 * 1) Pick the templates (language and level) that describe your ability best
 * 2) Go to your user page and edit it
 * 3) Add the appropriate code to your user page

You may want to put the template labels together in a box. See right for an example.

Adding the templates will also add your user page to the appropriate language categories.

My language doesn't have a template!
Check the list of Babel templates on Community Central. If the template for the particular combination of language and level you want has not been created yet on Community Central, create it there by copying and adapting those of an existing language. You may also need to adapt the main template, which holds the text of all combinations of language and level in all languages.

If you're unable to create it or make it work on Community Central, or if you need some particular adaptation of the templates, you can copy the language and level combination templates, plus the main  template, to correspondingly named pages in your local wiki, and then change them as you see fit. Alternatively, you can copy to your wiki the Babel templates of one of the Wikimedia sites below.

The copied (and possibly adapted) templates can then be used in you local wiki. For example, if you copied and adapted those from Community Central to create Babel templates for German, you'd use  for basic fluency, which calls the local template, instead of   which uses the shared template on Community Central.