[WikiEN-l] Templates for the masses

[Ray Saintonge]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> You old-timers, cast your minds back to 2003/2004 (everyone who joined
> after that, close your eyes and try to fake it).
>
> You are reading an interesting or important article when something
> suddenly strikes you as odd and untoward. Let's stipulate that you
> read the entire article and you are yet unsatisfied. Being a good
> Wikipedian, you consider correcting this apparent error - how could
> the Battle of New Orleans have been the last battle of the War of 1812
> when the treaty was signed long before it took place? shall be your
> query, say. And being a good Wikipedian, you happened to notice that
> the talk page was blue.
>   
Don't you mean that the link to the talk page is blue?  For me the talk 
page itself is still yellow.
> Now let's just pause a second. These days, why would anyone click on
> the talk page link? Essentially every talk page has been created just
> because of bots going around adding assessment tags and project
> banners and all that bric-a-brac.  People are slowly being trained to
> ignore talk pages - the signal to noise ratio used to be 1/0, as talk
> pages *always* had something a human had written. It might not be
> relevant to your current question, it might be on an entirely
> different issue (the exact number of casaulties as this old NY Times
> copy handed down in my family claims 2 less than does this
> Encyclopedia Britannica article, &etc..), but quite often it was quite
> germane (Yo peeps leave the date alone, remember the crazy-ass
> communication delays back then) or at least interesting.
>   
This is a really great example of where the effects of the techy side 
have had a strongly destructive effect on the social side.  The key 
effect is that these garbage templates discourage people from taking 
their edit wars to the talk page.  Problems with any subtlety at all are 
converted to simple black/white or yes/no arguments  We need to remember 
that talk pages were there from the beginning to provide an opportunity 
to work out problems.
> I don't think there's really anyway to solve this. Nobody is really
> advocating putting that kind of metadata into the article, which would
> be a herculean and sisyphean task; nobody is seriously talking about
> associating a second page with articles (one for discussion and the
> other for metadata).
>   
It does little good to belittle the idea of a separate metadata page as 
not serious when you don't even give arguemnts about why it's such a bad 
idea.
> But I think in a certain modest way there is a solution. Just display
> the talk automatically. At the bottom is a good place. Think about it:
> if it's some worthless banners and templates, you simply stop
> reading/scrolling-down at the categories - but if there is a lot left,
> then you continue reading and merely skip over the templates. The
> additional load time is negligible, it doesn't mess anything up, etc.
> And it's a relatively simple addition to one's monobook.js:
> <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests#Automatically_view_talk_page_discussion_while_looking_at_article>.
> I'm not suggesting it be put into the site-wide file, but I think it
> could be a step towards a programmatic solution for annoyed editors.
Not everybody wants to see the talk page, or even to load such a long 
page.  We already try to keep the article sizes down for the benefit of 
people with slow browsers. An active talk page can be very, very long, 
and can even have many archive pages.  This idea is not much different 
from sticking the metadata on the article page itself.

If the idea had any sort of usefulness it would need to be opt-in, 
because we can't expect everybody to be able to make sense of 
monobook.js.  The ones who really need to use the talk page are not the 
high-tech types that understand monobook.js; they are those editors who 
may understand and are familiar with content while being mystified with 
anything more complicated than the most basic wiki syntax.

Ec