[WikiEN-l] Template documentation convention

[Tim Starling]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi all,
>   Anyone know if there is a convention/guideline for how to document
> templates, given the existence of <noinclude>? Previously, the
> discussion page was used. Now it would seem more appropriate to move
> documentation onto the main template page, inclosed within
> <noinclude>. However, before launching into doing this, two questions:
> 
> * Is there consensus for this?
> * Is there more of a burden on the surver to transclude a template
> which includes a large amount of <noinclude>'d documentation?

I've been thinking about introducing a tag which specifies that the source of the template should be
displayed when you view the template page. There are a lot of meta-templates around where conversion
to HTML with their default parameter values substituted in doesn't really tell you much about them.
This would replace most uses for <includeonly>. Any comments on that?

In any case, I would recommend documenting templates using <noinclude> sections, as long as the
formatting is such that it is clear where the template stops and the documentation begins. I think
that would be an improvement for usability, over using the talk page. The server overhead should be
negligible (6ms per 100KB).

-- Tim Starling