Bah, forgot to Cc this to foundation-l and wikipedia-l. Sorry for the repost, wikitech.
Simetrical wrote:
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.
The Babel templates are the _original_ userboxes. The others, like "This user likes strawberry ice cream", came around later when people started creating their own parodies and imitations of the Babel boxes.
They also date from around the time when [[Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates]] was written, and from long before it was rebutted by [[Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance]]. Which, mind you, was also before ParserFunctions and a number of general improvements to the parser, so the concern wasn't _quite_ as silly then as it may seem now.
Actually, the reasonable thing would be to turn these templates into interface messages, probably specified via a simple extension, so that they can automatically be made available on all projects without having to create local copies on each wiki. Which is more or less what I assume (without actually looking, mind you) the proposed extension is doing, perhaps with some syntactic sugar thrown on top of it.