[WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext

[Ray Saintonge]

David Goodman wrote:
> Having various reference techniques is very useful for people writing
> articles, who can choose whatever they feel comfortable with; having
> multiple simultaneous techniques is  not quite as helpful for people
> trying to make small edits and fixes in articles, or adding
> references, because you need to be familiar with every individual one
> of them you might encounter.  Personally, for example, I never use the
> cite templates if I'm adding refs to an unreferenced article,   but i
> need to know them in case I work on an article already using them. And
> similarly with every possibility.
> I would rather have to learn any one thing, whether or not I dislike
> it, than need to learn them all. I recognize of course that this tends
> to inhibit experiment and improvement.
>
>   
This is well taken.  A lot of the templates have developed on an ad hoc 
basis, and when these become established there is a powerful 
unwillingness to change something that people are habituated to.  With 
multilayered tranclusion it becomes even more difficult to adapt 
templates to circumstances.With large quantities of existing templates 
it may very well be that you have no way of knowing that the template 
that you need already exists.

Perhaps each group of templates needs a global review from time to time 
to see that the templates work together.

Ec