On Apr 1, 2005 1:54 AM, Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com wrote:
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?
Well, as I and others have said, it's certainly being put to plenty of use (I gave some examples in the middle of http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028494.html). Whether this is "good" use or not is open to interpretation and debate, obviously.
Personally, I think the use on utilty pages (VfD, etc) is rather clever and makes the pages more useful - it allows the same content to be viewed in multiple ways. Obviously, that effect could be achieved by moving whole wodges of content to the Template: namespace, but that seems to me like a *worse* scenario, in that it pulls content that belongs in Project pages out of the Project namespace. [Note that, for a period just before the full template system was invented, people did exactly this, putting the discussions in the MediaWiki: namespace, to which transclusions were orginally limited]
I can, however, see your concern that this adds complexity to all sorts of things, particularly to do with reviewing, auditting - and dare I mention locking - content. All that would be true however limitted the feature was, and maybe you meant that there should be no templates at all. But the enthusiasm with which the feature was used before it was even properly implemented shows how much it's wanted in some form.
Basically, I think this comes down to a fundamental conflict within Wikipedia (and Wikimedia generally), which you could describe as between the "Wiki-" and the "-pedia" - on the one hand, the concept of a wiki is that it's simple, community-based, dynamic, etc; on the other hand, an encyclopedia should be well-presented, comprehensive, and reader-friendly. That conflict is what brought MediaWiki into being - from the need for namespaces to neatly seperate discussion and policy from articles onwards. [If one were designing with only the "Wiki-" part in mind, one probably wouldn't bother with page protection, for instance]
Add in the unprecedented *size* of Wikipedia, and templates become just another essential tool for the community to manage the content they want to present to readers. Among the diverse ways in which the template system has been used, I'm sure there would be many that you'd agree were extremely positive - templates, being, after all, a way to make management of repeated or similar content *easier*.
I think any such tool will be open to abuse, but also to positive creative use; telling the difference is a matter for the community, not the designers of the tool. I, for instance, would count as "abuse" stacks of attention boxes on one article, and templates nested so deeply and complexly that you can't work out where the actual content comes from (e.g. the calendars on en.wikipedia's date articles, which are cunning but tortuous). Neither problem can really be defined in technical terms, and some clearly feel they are valid uses, so I think the *software* is doing it's job just fine.
[Apologies for verbosity and/or tendency to rant; I do not claim this to be anything other than one opinion in a valid debate]