On 20/04/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
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.
That's certainly true, but unless you're talking about the cost of the documentation frequently changing, I suspect that's a pretty negligible cost. In extreme cases, perhaps a link to the talk page would be appropriate - going to the "discussion" page for documentation is, IMHO, extremely non-intuitive. In fact, I still fall into the trap of thinking a template is not documented at all when there is nothing on the actual template page.
Another solution in some cases might be to make a subpage called /help, and then to include that subpage into the main page. But on second thoughts maybe that doesn't solve the problem of page purging when the doc updates...
Steve