[WikiEN-l] A new and ugly trend

[Andrew Gray]

On 29/06/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> >So what you're saying  is that in-page template cruft is necessary because
> >talk pages have been taken over by template cruft?
> >
> >I hope you see the problem here.
> >
> His solution may be off, but he does have a point in identifying  a
> problem.  Using the talk pages for some kinds of meta data tends to
> detract from using them for discussion.

The problem is, the metadata is useful. It's not simply useless fluff,
so writing it off as a stupid idea or something to get rid of is a bad
move.

Well, it *can* be useful, anyway :-) It's certainly a lot better than
it was a couple of years ago, when we just had "project banners" - now
there's actual embedded metadata there, information about the quality
of the article or about certain fundamental aspects of it ("is about a
living persion" being perhaps the most useful); thanks to these
templates we're beginning to have some kind of an idea of what our
overall status is. It's fragmented, but it's improving.

It went on the talk page because everyone accepted it couldn't go on
the article, and the talk page - the meta-page devoted to that article
- seemed the obvious place for it. If you want to get the talk page
"back", we need to find some place to put article-specific metadata
and keep it accessible - nuking it won't help anyone.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk