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

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 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.

Agree with both David and Ray. One of the things I fear is having to
learn a new reference syntax when I've only just got used to the
current one (even though that's been around for a while). And
templates absolutely should be reviewed periodically, and organised
better. Having to spend the first ten minutes before you do something,
searching to see if it has already been done, is a bit annoying
sometimes. Even if that search fails, you are still not quite sure
whether you missed something or not.

Carcharoth