On Apr 1, 2005 1:54 AM, Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> wrote:
Forgive me if there was a big discussion of this while
I was in lurker
mode for the past year or so, but is it really a good idea to allow
arbitrary transclusions at all?
Well, as I and others have said, it's certainly being put to plenty of
use (I gave some examples in the middle of
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-March/028494.html).
Whether this is "good" use or not is open to interpretation and
debate, obviously.
Personally, I think the use on utilty pages (VfD, etc) is rather
clever and makes the pages more useful - it allows the same content to
be viewed in multiple ways. Obviously, that effect could be achieved
by moving whole wodges of content to the Template: namespace, but that
seems to me like a *worse* scenario, in that it pulls content that
belongs in Project pages out of the Project namespace. [Note that, for
a period just before the full template system was invented, people did
exactly this, putting the discussions in the MediaWiki: namespace, to
which transclusions were orginally limited]
I can, however, see your concern that this adds complexity to all
sorts of things, particularly to do with reviewing, auditting - and
dare I mention locking - content. All that would be true however
limitted the feature was, and maybe you meant that there should be no
templates at all. But the enthusiasm with which the feature was used
before it was even properly implemented shows how much it's wanted in
some form.
Basically, I think this comes down to a fundamental conflict within
Wikipedia (and Wikimedia generally), which you could describe as
between the "Wiki-" and the "-pedia" - on the one hand, the concept
of
a wiki is that it's simple, community-based, dynamic, etc; on the
other hand, an encyclopedia should be well-presented, comprehensive,
and reader-friendly. That conflict is what brought MediaWiki into
being - from the need for namespaces to neatly seperate discussion and
policy from articles onwards. [If one were designing with only the
"Wiki-" part in mind, one probably wouldn't bother with page
protection, for instance]
Add in the unprecedented *size* of Wikipedia, and templates become
just another essential tool for the community to manage the content
they want to present to readers. Among the diverse ways in which the
template system has been used, I'm sure there would be many that you'd
agree were extremely positive - templates, being, after all, a way to
make management of repeated or similar content *easier*.
I think any such tool will be open to abuse, but also to positive
creative use; telling the difference is a matter for the community,
not the designers of the tool. I, for instance, would count as "abuse"
stacks of attention boxes on one article, and templates nested so
deeply and complexly that you can't work out where the actual content
comes from (e.g. the calendars on en.wikipedia's date articles, which
are cunning but tortuous). Neither problem can really be defined in
technical terms, and some clearly feel they are valid uses, so I think
the *software* is doing it's job just fine.
[Apologies for verbosity and/or tendency to rant; I do not claim this
to be anything other than one opinion in a valid debate]
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]