[WikiEN-l] Templates for the masses

[Gwern Branwen]

On 10/7/07, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does it not drive anyone else up the wall the incessant templates jammed
> onto the top of our articles? Sure some of the articles have issues that
> readers as well as editors should be aware of, but it's really ridiculous
> having these Vogonic bureaucratic Wiki-speak instructions/jargon stamped
> before the article text for all and sundry to enjoy. Half the time the
> templates aren't even warranted, or at the least the issue is not important
> enough to demand anything other than a note on the talk page. It's far too
> easy for people just to slap on templates onto articles in a sort of
> wiki-process-allowed defacement of content.
>
> I mean the trivia section warning for one thing. I consider myself firmly in
> the anti-trivia camp, and indeed I'd nearly support removing offending
> sections to talk pages as well when asking people to integrate the brainless
> factoids; but really, there's no need to give instructions on the situation
> to all our readers. It's just not that important! Templates in fact compound
> the problem by highlighting the trivia sections! It makes no sense!
>
> As regards the templates that are somewhat necessary (don't use our
> second-hand info about hurricanes in your area, etc) can a specific area
> separate from the article content be used for the message? Something like
> how the fundraising message is displayed?
>
> Zoney

It does in fact drive me up the wall, I will heartily agree. But it
bugs me for entirely different reasons.

You old-timers, cast your minds back to 2003/2004 (everyone who joined
after that, close your eyes and try to fake it).

You are reading an interesting or important article when something
suddenly strikes you as odd and untoward. Let's stipulate that you
read the entire article and you are yet unsatisfied. Being a good
Wikipedian, you consider correcting this apparent error - how could
the Battle of New Orleans have been the last battle of the War of 1812
when the treaty was signed long before it took place? shall be your
query, say. And being a good Wikipedian, you happened to notice that
the talk page was blue.

Now let's just pause a second. These days, why would anyone click on
the talk page link? Essentially every talk page has been created just
because of bots going around adding assessment tags and project
banners and all that bric-a-brac.  People are slowly being trained to
ignore talk pages - the signal to noise ratio used to be 1/0, as talk
pages *always* had something a human had written. It might not be
relevant to your current question, it might be on an entirely
different issue (the exact number of casaulties as this old NY Times
copy handed down in my family claims 2 less than does this
Encyclopedia Britannica article, &etc..), but quite often it was quite
germane (Yo peeps leave the date alone, remember the crazy-ass
communication delays back then) or at least interesting.

I don't think there's really anyway to solve this. Nobody is really
advocating putting that kind of metadata into the article, which would
be a herculean and sisyphean task; nobody is seriously talking about
associating a second page with articles (one for discussion and the
other for metadata).

But I think in a certain modest way there is a solution. Just display
the talk automatically. At the bottom is a good place. Think about it:
if it's some worthless banners and templates, you simply stop
reading/scrolling-down at the categories - but if there is a lot left,
then you continue reading and merely skip over the templates. The
additional load time is negligible, it doesn't mess anything up, etc.
And it's a relatively simple addition to one's monobook.js:
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests#Automatically_view_talk_page_discussion_while_looking_at_article>.
I'm not suggesting it be put into the site-wide file, but I think it
could be a step towards a programmatic solution for annoyed editors.

--
gwern