Cross-posted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.
David Gerard wrote:
On 13/10/2007, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
At the very least, we should move things like WikiProjects, GA nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.
That'sa fantastically good idea! See if it flies on the Village Pump, etc. A bot run would be enough once you have something acceptable to the VP and the most template-heavy projects.
I don't think it's a good idea at all.
Instead, I would suggest having two edit boxes on the edit page -- one at the top for templates, and a second one for the main article text. The one at the top would be hidden by default, you would click a button to expand it.
The dividing line between the two would be determined heuristically on the server side.
A link would be provided to a non-JS version of the edit page, for compatibility. A user preference could also be added.
Contrary to popular belief, PHP programming is not impossible.
-- Tim Starling