On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
That is of course ridiculous, only a couple of templates should be required for "box with a number in it".
Remarkably, at least some of them appear to be manually-typed-out HTML, or substed or something. Apparently people didn't believe in meta-templates?
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_ksh&action=edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_zh&action=edit
Some use a template . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_de&action=edit
. . . but it's {{userbox}}. Evidently something like
{{babel|de|German language|Dieser Benutzer spricht '''[[:Category:User de|Deutsch]]''' als '''[[:Category:User de-N|Muttersprache]]'''.}}
didn't seem useful to anyone.
To be fair, though, you really do have to have one template for each language/proficiency combination, if you want the sentence saying "This user speaks Old Church Slavonic on a native level" or whatever properly translated to each and every one of the hundreds of languages that at least one person speaks. Whether this is grounds for an extension, rather than a bunch of master templates on Meta that get copied out to the projects regularly by friendly neighborhood bots, is a separate question. (Now, if the extension were one to enable scary transclusion in a sane fashion . . .)