The edittemplate directive is supplied by the edittemplate plugin.

This directive allows registering template pages, that provide default content for new pages created using the web frontend. To register a template, insert a template directive on some other page.

[[!edittemplate  template="bugtemplate" match="bugs/*"]]

In the above example, the page named "bugtemplate" is registered as a template to be used when any page named "bugs/*" is created. To avoid the directive displaying a note about the template being registered, add "silent=yes".

Often the template page contains a simple skeleton for a particular type of page. For the bug report pages in the above example, it might look something like:

Package: 
Version: 
Reproducible: y/n
Details:

The template page can also contain HTML::Template directives, like other ikiwiki templates. Currently only one variable is set: <TMPL_VAR name> is replaced with the name of the page being created.

It's generally not a good idea to put the edittemplate directive in the template page itself, since the directive would then be included as part of the template on new pages, which would then in turn be registered as templates. If multiple pages are registered as templates for a new page, an arbitrary one is chosen, so that could get confusing.