On 25/11/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/25/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What are the downsides of templates in articles?
Wasting the reader's time and bandwidth.
Oh, please.
Making the article unreadable on mobiles
That's solvable.
while in no way providing a service to the reader.
Templates for editors aren't meant to provide a "service to the reader". {{Uncat}}, {{cleanup}}, {{wikify}} etc are all in that category - the reader doesn't gain from being told the article isn't categorised, it's for editors that we put that there.
Arguably there could be some way of showing/hiding these templates for different types of readers, but Wikipedia has done pretty well out of naively assuming that every reader is an editor waiting to happen.
Steve
Uncat shouldn't be in the article. Wikify is generally there when the the problem with the article is serious enough that we should acknowledge it.