From: Andrew Whitworth [mailto:wknight8111@gmail.com]
Now, I won't disparage the idea that standardized user-welcome and user-warning templates would be nice for under-populated small wikis, and I'm sure the SWMT would love these. However, there are going to be a lot of exceptions for larger and more-established wikis that do not want to share message templates with meta/en.wikipedia.
Exactly! And the babel templates are exactly the same. /If/ we decide to have a system standardized across wikis (a good idea, IMO) then hardcoding them is not an optimal solution. Neither would it be optimal for warning templates or anything else I mentioned. I'm actually not advocating that - rather I'm saying that if you want a sub-optimal solution, then you might as well have a sub-optimal solution for the general problem.
The optimal solution is something like: * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12306 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9890 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9890
There's no reason to put content into the code - the babel templates are templates just like any other.
I suppose in the short-term, a sub-optimal solution is acceptable, but I just don't see the problem this solution is for. (Hypothetically it is there, but in practice, it is not serious, in my experience)
Mike