On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 23:25:24 -0600, Hunter Peress hunterp@gmail.com wrote:

My idea: http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607 was denied because its similar to a fix thats in 1.4 CVS: http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143

This 143 fix is not sufficient because it makes links to templates available from the editing screen. My proposal is for a backlink (to the template itself or its edit page) to be rendered in directly in a standard article (not only on its edit page).

I've marked 607 as a dupe of 229, and 229 as WONTFIX, not dupe. This is clearly a distinct feature, even if its one we don't want to code.

I write this argument to the list now because if we have a link in the actual page for editing sections, then we should surely have a link helping us quickly get back to a template.

I think the counter-arguments are: 1) people currently use templates to *hide* parts of a page [e.g. en.wikipedia's Main_Page is split into templated sections which are unprotected, but you have to find them first, giving a "speed bump" effect] Not the strongest argument, but worth bearing in mind

2) unlike sections, templates have no defined structural extent, by which I mean they're not always the same shape: some are tables, some are paragraphs, some just a fragment of text that could be included in another paragraph. It's not clear how an automatic mechanism could position an edit link so that it was clear what it referred to without limiting the usefulness of the templates themselves (by having an automatic frame around them or somesuch).

Perhaps a simple keyword could be added that inserted such a link on demand, to be used at will by template editors. As mentioned in comments on bug 229, there is already a workaround in use at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Ed; perhaps something like this could be incorporated into the software?