On Oct 13, 2007, at 9:40 AM, David Gerard wrote:
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification- three-ways-wikipedia-keeps-99-of/
(no, he didn't know the word "obscurantism.")
Discussion please.
His point about talk pages is particularly good - I doubt a lot of the templatecruft we put on talk pages is worthwhile given the oppressively long amount of non-text that it brings up when one tries to edit.
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.
-Phil