I have two comments in context of templates:
- Unified history for template programming and documentation – this is absolutely not desirable.
- JSON of TemplateData on separated unit – may be, if static generation, but other methods are to be supported as today.
Unified history for template programming and documentation
- Today these are mostly separated pages with separated history.
- This helps to get easily an overview what happened in case of debugging.
- Imagine that someone complains about strange behaviour, observed multiple times somewhere since about two weeks.
- Looking into history of programming page there has been a change 19 days ago. On closer look under certain conditions a side effect is obviously responsible for the problem. Last edit before has been 63 days ago.
- The doc page has been changed 3 days ago, 7 days ago, 10, 15, 20, 25, 33 days ago, on several days multiple edits.
- How should I see which of these edits has been effective for transclusion?
- The programming page is transcluded in thousands of pages.
- Documentation, test collection, examples and so on are belonging to the same template, but transcluded one or zero times. Why throwing all these histories together into one big pile only?
JSON of TemplateData on separated unit
- That may be done, if and only if this is a static JSON object only.
- However, TemplateData may be generated by template transclusion using
#tag:syntax. - Look at w:en:Template:lang-en, lang-fr, lang-es, and hundreds more.
- A central scheme may be maintained, which does most of documentation. That is called by template parameters
enandEnglish, orfrandFrench, and so on. - It is not desirable to be forced to create a separated JSON page for every single template.
- See the corresponding w:de:Template:enS, frS, esS and hundreds more, derived from shared patttern.