Steve Bennett wrote:
Hi all, Anyone know if there is a convention/guideline for how to document templates, given the existence of <noinclude>? Previously, the discussion page was used. Now it would seem more appropriate to move documentation onto the main template page, inclosed within <noinclude>. However, before launching into doing this, two questions:
- Is there consensus for this?
- Is there more of a burden on the surver to transclude a template
which includes a large amount of <noinclude>'d documentation?
Any edits to the template itself, even to <noinclude> sections, force a purge of every page using the template. For widely used templates, this may be a significant cost. Thus, I'd recommend keeping only the most basic and stable documentation on the template page itself, and put the rest on the talk page. In fact, for the majority of templates, the only "documentation" needed on the template page is the default rendering of the template code itself.
But that's just my opinion.