"Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
wrote in message
[snip]
Anything else would defeat the purpose. We need to provide the right
tools to minimize the pain of operations like this. ... And, of
course, avoid putting factual information in template pages if that is
followed strictly, who cares if a 'stable' page has a somewhat
outdated look and feel.
That sounds really promising. I hope this decouples rippling changes
from templates to articles.
If I understand this correct, this might help a lot on
{{en:book reference}} [1] and {{en:web reference}} [2], as those use that
unpopular {{en:qif}} [3] (BTW, qif is now protected).
It does not matter, whether an article uses an old version of book
reference or not. A manual action per using article to update to
a newer version of book reference would be just fine if we could in turn
continue using book reference in articles (which we can't if {{qif}} is
eliminated [4] without an equivalent replacement, which might possibly
be AzaToth's code proposal [5]).
Templates should not be used to spread updated information onto a bunch
of articles, if this harms the servers (and it obviously does, as it
is implemented now).
Adrian Buehlmann [6]
References:
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Book_reference
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Web_reference
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Qif
[4]
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-December/033092.html
[5]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AzaToth/Logic
[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Adrian_Buehlmann