[WikiEN-l] talk page banner-cruft

[Charlotte Webb]

On 8/2/08, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, it's rejected.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_using_WikiProject_talk_page_templates

Ah, so I'm not the only crazy one. I will have to bookmark this page.

Obviously the locus of this particular discussion was the
{{talkheader}} template. I do have similar issues with the myriad of
wiki-project templates, but I am willing to concede that the
quality/assessment/whatever data might be genuinely useful to other
users. I have something similar on my own talk page but it was
entirely a drunken joke and completely unrelated to the current
debate.

On the other hand, with the advent of hidden categories, many of these
features could be migrated to article space, much like the Persondata
template (using some CSS to make it invisible by default but viewable
by those interested).

If the contents of the talkheader template are terribly important it
should be part of an appropriate mediawiki interface page rather than
something people manually and indiscriminately add to talk pages when
they have nothing better to do.

—C.W.