David Gerard wrote:
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#.5B.5BWikip…
A question: is there any good reason to keep templates in templates working
on the Wikimedia servers?
They're pretty useful in some cases to simplify the markup a user has to
edit. For example, the British election results used a template where
you put the name of the party as one parameter, and based on that it
then included a meta-template with the appropriate formatting (displayed
name that fits in the width, article to link the name to, and color to
use for highlighting the cell).
This could be replaced by scriptable templates, but that may be a bigger
problem. Basically, subtemplates in a lot of places are used as a
simulation of "if" statements, and in a lot of places, "if" statements
are exactly the natural thing to do. An alternative is to duplicate the
templates for every possible outcome of the 'if", like
{{templatewithparam1}} {{templatewithparam2}}, etc., which are identical
except for the one part that should be different, but that's much less
convenient from a user's point of view.
-Mark