On 20/04/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)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