On 11/25/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What are the downsides of templates in articles?
Wasting the reader's time and bandwidth.
Oh, please.
Making the article unreadable on mobiles
That's solvable.
while in no way providing a service to the reader.
Templates for editors aren't meant to provide a "service to the reader". {{Uncat}}, {{cleanup}}, {{wikify}} etc are all in that category - the reader doesn't gain from being told the article isn't categorised, it's for editors that we put that there.
Arguably there could be some way of showing/hiding these templates for different types of readers, but Wikipedia has done pretty well out of naively assuming that every reader is an editor waiting to happen.
Steve