On 10/15/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Cross-posted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.
David Gerard wrote:
On 13/10/2007, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
At the very least, we should move things like WikiProjects, GA nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.
That'sa fantastically good idea! See if it flies on the Village Pump, etc. A bot run would be enough once you have something acceptable to the VP and the most template-heavy projects.
I don't think it's a good idea at all.
Instead, I would suggest having two edit boxes on the edit page -- one at the top for templates, and a second one for the main article text.
You mean, like the on-the-fly separation (and reintegration) of language links, categories, and "invisible/at-the-end-of-the-article" templates I hacked into the core code during the Berlin CCC in 2005? 2004? ;-)
Seriously, I think separation of such meta-data on the fly is possible and should be attempted again. Part of which would encompass header/footer templates. Maybe "surround" the main edit box with three (initially hidden) boxes, on the top (header templates, infoboxes), on the right (categories, interlanguage), and bottom (bottom templates, end-of-article navboxes).
If this too extreme, maybe we could create bogus section links that would /only/ show top or bottom templates in the edit box.
Cheers, Magnus