Wikipedia talk:Avoid template creep

Evolving problem

Having made a couple myself, I can see that there is an evolving problem, particularly with the proliferation of "navigation templates" on Wikipedia. I know that many editors are and have been doing very good work cleaning up and standardizing template schemes, rounding up the bad ones and taking them to TfD, but it just seemed like the time was right for an essay like this. Do a search for "template creep" and similar phrases and you'll see many instances that pre-date this essay. Feedback and improvements are welcome, and please feel free to mention or link to it where appropriate. heqs ·:. 20:48, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Great essay! The template namespace is a mess, and identifying the problem is a good start. Gracenotes^T § 05:24, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Finally there is an essay about this. I support this to be a guideline. — Indon (reply) — 15:09, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

It would be nice to have some actual usage data

Whether to include or exclude a navigation template should not rest on any individual's aesthetic judgement, but rather on actual data as to how many users are viewing or clicking the links in the template. Unfortunately, on Wikipedia we have no way to collect this data, so we're probably stuck with irresolvable arguments based on aesthetics. A template which might seem like clutter to one person might be a godsend to another. Usability consultants such as Jakob Nielsen emphasize the need to actually observe statistically significant numbers of users as they use a site, for example with eye tracking devices to see where the users look on a page and how long various parts hold their attention. Without this kind of data, it's just one person's subjective opinion against another's. Self-reported complaints or compliments from a small fraction of users may be unrepresentative. In any case, many of the articles I'm interested in have (or had) no navigation templates at all, so I would agree that if someone wants to make a new template, best to make one for articles that don't already have any. Going from zero to one template on an article probably adds a lot more value than going from, say, six templates to seven. There is probably a "rich get richer" mechanism for template accumulation, whereby the editors who focus on a topic that already has lots of templates will learn by example to create more, whereas a topic with few or no templates is less able to train its editors to correct that deficiency. --Teratornis (talk) 22:23, 1 September 2008 (UTC)