On 10/7/07, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
Does it not drive anyone else up the wall the incessant templates jammed onto the top of our articles? Sure some of the articles have issues that readers as well as editors should be aware of, but it's really ridiculous having these Vogonic bureaucratic Wiki-speak instructions/jargon stamped before the article text for all and sundry to enjoy. Half the time the templates aren't even warranted, or at the least the issue is not important enough to demand anything other than a note on the talk page. It's far too easy for people just to slap on templates onto articles in a sort of wiki-process-allowed defacement of content.
I mean the trivia section warning for one thing. I consider myself firmly in the anti-trivia camp, and indeed I'd nearly support removing offending sections to talk pages as well when asking people to integrate the brainless factoids; but really, there's no need to give instructions on the situation to all our readers. It's just not that important! Templates in fact compound the problem by highlighting the trivia sections! It makes no sense!
As regards the templates that are somewhat necessary (don't use our second-hand info about hurricanes in your area, etc) can a specific area separate from the article content be used for the message? Something like how the fundraising message is displayed?
Zoney
It does in fact drive me up the wall, I will heartily agree. But it bugs me for entirely different reasons.
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.
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.
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).
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.
-- gwern