The Cunctator wrote:
On 6/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
One reason these tags may be necessary is because talk page don't work as good for these issues as a few years ago.
It used to be that if you saw a problem with an article that you couldn't immediately solve yourself, you'd leave a message on the talk page: "Look at that sentence, it doesn't sound right, does anyone have an idea how to improve it?"
It used to be that only a small fraction of our articles had talk pages. If I came across an article with a blue link to the talk page, I always took a look; sometimes there was an interesting didcussion, sometimes just a cleanup notice.
Nowadays, 90% of our articles have a talk page, and 80% of them are empty.[*]
So what you're saying is that in-page template cruft is necessary because talk pages have been taken over by template cruft?
I hope you see the problem here.
His solution may be off, but he does have a point in identifying a problem. Using the talk pages for some kinds of meta data tends to detract from using them for discussion.
Ec