On 11/13/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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)