On 11/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
The process that Tom describes in relation to the
Irish articles appears
to be organized vandalism by the wiki's Hell's Angels.
I think that's taking it too far. The issue seems to be that what's
in the guidelines for how templates should be used (content that's in
multiple articles) is contrary to what a number of editors have been
doing (using them to separate out complex table and infobox markup
from the main page).
That being said, it seems to me that once it became obvious that the
true issue was one of POLICY, the issue should have been removed from
[[WP:TFD]] and discussed somewhere else, a consensus formed on whether
using templates to extract complexity from a single article is a good
idea or not, and THEN clean things up if needed.
IMO, the argument of 'server performance' being used as the
justification to remove such templates is spurious. The significant
hit on server performance is when a template that's used on LOTS of
articles gets changed - then, the cached rendering of each page using
the template must be flushed and each page must be regenerated on the
next use. The transclusion of a template into only one article is not
that heavy a load - if it were, we wouldn't be doing template
transclusion at all.
I tend to the conclusion that what I really dislike about the deletion
pages is the attempt to make policy in them. Policy issues should not
be decided lynch-mob fashion under a deletion deadline. In this way,
those who frequent the deletion pages - no matter what "side" they're
on - are trying to set Wikipedia policy for the community as a whole,
without attempting to involve the wider community in that "consensus
building".
-Matt (User:Morven)