Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com) [050401 10:55]:
Forgive me if there was a big discussion of this while I was in lurker mode for the past year or so, but is it really a good idea to allow arbitrary transclusions at all? I can see the usefulness of templates overriding the problems and limiting their spread to a few cases; but arbitrarily including text that constantly changes seems like a good way to screw up things like article provenance, evaluations, and such.
At present it's used to very good effect in the Wikipedia: namespace, to make pages such as [[WP:FAC]] and [[WP:VFD]] manageable. Note that VFD actually transcludes pages largely made of transclusions.
Templates that masquerade as actual article text are considered decidedly improper - one of the earliest candidates on [[Wikipedia:Templates for deletion]] was one such - and [[Wikipedia:Template namespace]] includes the admonition "Templates should not masquerade as article content in the main article namespace; instead, place the text directly into the article." (which I wrote.)
(I have no idea of what whacky tricks people may have gotten up to on other language Wikipedias.)
So far people haven't gotten much away with egregious template abuse, and the category system has *mostly* quelled the urge to bloody ugly subject series boxes.
- d.