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?
I've been thinking about introducing a tag which specifies that the source of the template should be displayed when you view the template page. There are a lot of meta-templates around where conversion to HTML with their default parameter values substituted in doesn't really tell you much about them. This would replace most uses for <includeonly>. Any comments on that?
In any case, I would recommend documenting templates using <noinclude> sections, as long as the formatting is such that it is clear where the template stops and the documentation begins. I think that would be an improvement for usability, over using the talk page. The server overhead should be negligible (6ms per 100KB).
-- Tim Starling