[Wikipedia-l] Templates

Tue Jun 22 15:35:49 UTC 2004

I like templates, for sure about that.  And a lot of us do.  But I 
still have two complaints about them (both of which I've placed a 
request in sourceforge).  I'd like to hear a few peer opinions about my 
two complaints:

1. The way that pipes work in templates, but that's an oft-requested 
feature/bugfix.

2. The lack of default template parameters.  A lot of those "incumbent 
series" navigation links could be done with templates if there were 
only default template parameters to cover the first and last articles 
in the series.  For example, a simplified incumbent template might have

{{{prev}}} | Team captains of the Calgary Flames | {{{next}}}

and another would be

{{{prev}}} | National Pokédex | {{{next}}}

Of course, if you specified something in [[Template:Prev]] or 
[[Template:Next]], you could get default template parameters, but what 
would you put in either page?  Surely you can't put something in either 
page without making it irrelevant for one purpose ("First Captain", 
"First Pokédex Entry") or diluting its meaning ("First").  (There is 
also the issue of the third pair of brackets, but we'll leave it aside)

What I'd like to see is subpages fulfilling that purpose.  Given 
[[Template:foo]] with contents {{{bar}}}, What I'd like to see is for 
MediaWiki to, when instantiated without specifying what {{{bar}}} 
should be:

- first check if [[Template:foo/bar]] exists (yes, this would mean that 
forward slashes can't be part of a template name...) and replace 
{{{bar}}} with the contents if it does
- if it doesn't, replace {{{bar}}} with the contents of 
[[Template:Bar]] with a set of brackets around it (like it is done now)

Is this idea a good one...?