This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is intended to give enough examples to help understand how ETVP operates.

ETVP stands for Easy to Visually Parse, in other words, it should be easy to look at the wikitext of an article, and immediately see (visual) what it does. Most notably, it applies to citation templates and Infoboxes (just take a look at what the Infobox on Noam Chomsky was like before[a] I applied ETVP to it), but it applies to the whole of any article, from top to bottom. This automatically makes the wikitext easier to read (parse) and to edit, so that mistakes are easier to spot and correct.

The term parse also refers to the need to parse the argument-value pairs specified by the template (a task that is necessary when checking the template for errors). This can be done at a glance (visual) for templates formatted in ETVP, but is almost impossible to do for turd-formatted templates ("turds" for short), a term used in this documentation as another way to describe long horizontally-formatted templates (LHTs).

The term ETVP is used ambiguously to describe the style, or the principles underlying the style, or the script that applies the style.

To understand fully how ETVP works, open these pages in edit mode, using the wiki text editor, or an external editor (not the VE editor), and examine the wikitext. The ETVP script can also, at the option of the user, make wholesale changes to the external appearance of an article; this will be the case, for example, when moving from the dungheap style to short-form. Examine the article history to see when this happens.

Using short-form referencing edit

Look at the "Notes" section of most of these articles (Noam Chomsky is a good example). These notes used to used have the usual {{sfn}} at the end. They now use {{harv}} instead. A good example of how in-line parenthetical referencing can actually enhance the appearance of an article, although the citation style remains, overall, for these examples, short-form.

Aboriginal Australians edit

There are nearly 700 articles on Aboriginal Australians written in ETVP. They are all included on User:NSH001/Aboriginal Australians, along with some articles not written in ETVP (mostly on languages, Australian places and massacres of Australian indigenous peoples).

Using list-defined references edit

Using parenthetical referencing edit

Notes edit

  1. ^