On 8/7/06, SPUI drspui@gmail.com wrote:
What's your opinion on stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Njt-sta ?
Hmm, doesn't look too harmful. One downside is it creates a dependancy on a particular naming scheme [...(NJT station), ...(NCS station)...], which is discouraged by our naming conventions policy (which states that generally names should *not* be disambiguated in this manner unless needed). However, if that naming convention ever changes (eg, all the (River LINE) articles become (River Line)), then the change only has to be made in one place - a Good Thing.
Another downside is that it hides (unhelpfully) what's going on. {{njt-sta|Union}} doesn't look like a link. Everyone knows that [[Union (NJT Station)|]] is a piped link, but a template could be anything.
Also, the general downside of templates that automatically add the square brackets for you is that you can't repipe them to something better as appropriate. Maybe in some page you want the text to appear as [[Union (NJT Station)|Union Station]], while avoiding hard coding in the actual name of the article. You can't.
In general, I'm definitely in favour of wrapping any repetitive code in a template. As an example, I recently created {{noteson|...}} which simply links to a certain site with some given text. The idea being that if you're going to have 150 different links to the same site around wikipedia, it's bad if they're presented in 150 different ways.
In this particular case, I'm not sure it's incredibly helpful (redirects would to a certain extent solve the problem of pages moving), but it's not harmful either.
Steve