On 30 December 2010 08:55, Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Any solution that calls for endless templates is a bad
one socially as
well as technically, and at the point where you even consider
something on that scale you should probably be consulting developers
for a better way, like a way to do parent!child relationships.
This goes for other cases too. While we dont need to be bothering the
devs for every little thing, overloading the template system to get
around shortcomings in mediawiki is a pretty good sign that a better
way can or should exist.
Longstanding experence indicates that any solution that requires
developer work is not in fact a solution.
Process templates as seen on en,wp are another huge
example of this.
All the xfd stuff, requests for x, and similar processes could be
handled better with a chunk of backend code than with piles upon piles
of ever growing templates, and all it would take is a reasonable
request, decent specification, and enough momentum to go through with
the project. In fact, i think its been discussed on strategy already.
Thing is
1)The average en wikipedian doesn't follow the strategywiki and any
further attempts to use it to implement changes on en are unlikely to
end well
2)En has control over those templates. Result is that the en community
doesn't need dev work before making changes to it's XFD procedures.
It's also able to directly address the difficult cases that even the
best spec is unlikely to meet. You call it a weird corner case that
will never happen. We call it Tuesday.
These things always get derailed though, because
people are
apparently more willing to put up with a horrible solution than a good
one that falls short of perfect.
People would rather put up with a solution that can be shown to work
rather than one that:
a)doesn't exist and any existence is on a far from certain timetable
b)Can't have it's bugs fixed on the fly.
If we are doomed as some naysayers claim we are, then
its that very
attitude of resisting improvements and reform that will be our demise
- we will be so busy arguing about what color to paint the bikeshed
that we wont even see that someone is building something better across
the street.
The further we fall behind by allowing our goals and mission and our
technology and policies to take a backseat to arguments about
bikesheds the easier it will become for someone else to come in and do
the job better.
Actually colour of templates is one thing that pretty much has been settled.
There are improvements that can be made but removing one of the
community's most powerful tools to make new things happen is not one
of them.
Instead you would be better off looking to collapsible templates and
perhaps moving common ones like infoboxes into their own namespaces
(note this already started happening with things like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Rolle_Canal_map ).
--
geni