Editing Help:Transclusion (section)

===Composite pages===
Composite pages consist, wholly or partly, of transcluded component pages. The wikitext of such a page may, partly or fully, consist of tags, for the inclusion of component pages. The component pages are usually not in the template namespace, and are often full pages in their own right. Composite pages are intended to gather them into a central location.<!-- "usually not" is too vague; explain the exceptions that prove the rule! --> 

Examples of composite pages:
* [[Wikipedia:Village pump]]: mostly consists of the transcluded page [[Template:Village pump]].
* A daily page like [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 May 31]], where each component page consists of the discussion on the deletion of one Wikipedia page, e.g., [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sp3tt]]. For this day, 75 component pages made up the composite page.
* [[m:Meta:Translation/Coordination]], mainly containing
** [[m:Meta:Translation/Coordination/List/Meta]]
** [[m:Meta:Translation/Coordination/List/Main]]

This allows the choice between viewing the component pages separately or together. Viewing a composite page is convenient when there are many small, related component pages, in that it allows an overview of all the components without the effort of following numerous links.

In general, each component page and the composite page are treated separately.  While the actual changes on the component pages will be transcluded onto the composite page, the edit history, recent changes, page-watch settings, page protection, TOC, "what links here" links, and other features of the composite page do not reflect, or affect, the histories, watch settings, protection levels, ''what links here'' lists of the component pages.  The composite page is a page in its own right.  The talk page of a composite page is used to talk about the composition and the page in general, not the component pages; although it in turn could be a composite of the talk pages of the component pages.

Editing a section of a component page can be done directly from the composite page, see [[Help:Section#Editing sections of included templates|editing sections of included templates]]. After saving, one ends up editing the component page to which the section belongs.

On projects with the [[Help:Interwiki linking#Interlanguage links|interlanguage link feature]], the composite page shows the combined interlanguage links of all component pages, hence possibly multiple links for one language or even for one page.

See also [[Wikipedia talk:Template namespace/Archive 1#transcluding prose]].