[WikiEN-l] talk page banner-cruft

[Andrew Gray]

2008/8/2 SPUI <drspui at gmail.com>:
> Charlotte Webb wrote:
>> There is a discussion on WP:AN about this [1] which has incidentally
>> spilled over onto my talk page. No I'm not canvassing or asking
>> anybody to comment there, but I'd just like some personal feedback, so
>> I can at least figure out whether I've gone completely nuts or if the
>> concerns I've raised have some degree of merit.
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AN#Talkpage_deletion_question
>
> Sorry, it's rejected.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_using_WikiProject_talk_page_templates

The current objection seems to be only ones with {{talkheader}}, which
is indeed pretty useless - the link is objecting to project templates,
which is subtly different.

Project banners *are* meaningful - they do serve a useful logistical
function, in that they're infrastructure that can let us keep tabs on
article quality (and suchlike metadata) without interfering with the
article itself. Without them, we'd be hard pressed to come up with
this wealth of data:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index

These "rich metadata" templates cover some 70% of our articles, and
mean that over 55% of the encyclopedia has some kind of explicit
quality assessment. I'd say this is more than worth the occasional
annoyance of "oh, no discussion after all".

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