Wikipedia:Navigation template

This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates guideline. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

Shortcut WP:NAV

This page in a nutshell: A navigation template links between existing articles belonging to the same topic on English Wikipedia. There are two types: "navigation boxes" (or navboxes) and "sidebars".

A navigation template is a grouping of links used in multiple related articles to facilitate navigation between those articles. Editing of a navigation template is done in a central place, the template page.

There are two main varieties of navigation template: navigation boxes (or navboxes), designed to sit at the very bottom of articles, and sidebars, designed to sit at the side of the article text. The two are complementary and either or both may be appropriate in different situations.

The usual way to create navigation templates is to use the {{navbox}} or {{sidebar}} master templates. This simplifies the process of creating a functional and consistent template.

Do not rely solely on navboxes for links to articles highly relevant to a particular article. Navboxes are not displayed on the mobile website for Wikipedia, which accounts for around half of readers. See Phabricator ticket T124168 for progress on the mobile issue. See Phabricator ticket T124168 for work on making navboxes' appearance better on mobile.

Navboxes are categorized under Category:Navigational boxes. Some WikiProjects maintain a list of their navigation templates.