Lee Daniel Crocker (lee(a)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.