Till Westermayer wrote:

Keep wikipedia simple!

Ahem - Erik was talking about extending the template system he is working on for use in /Wikibooks/ in order to create wiki books. I agree that such a mechanism /should not/ be allowed in Wikipedia since having books within Wikipedia is counter to the non-linear hyperlinked nature of the project. Having things in a specified sequence /is/ the whole point of Wikibooks, though. Again, we need a Wikimedia mailing list to discuss these things.

I would like to see how Erik's idea could be used to reuse modules. For example, different instructors will want to organize our textbooks in different ways - we should let them do that on Wikibooks without having to fork modules - only TOC's should be forked as a general rule (we should maintain one reference TOC edition though ; alternate TOC's can be part of the instructor's user page).

Of course a template mechanism could be useful for many things -- but it also moves Wikipedias markup language further in the direction of a programming language, i.e. something most non-techs see as complicated.

So,

<table border=0 width="200"> <th><td colspan=2>== %%Name%% ==</td></th> <tr><td>Population</td><td>%%Population%%</td></tr> </table>

is less complicated than;

|Country table |Name => Germany |Population => 83 million |____

Sorry, but I don't buy your slippery slope argument.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)