Category talk:Pages with incorrectly substituted templates

Here are 150 articles

That have Ambox substed in them before we added the diagnostic.

Rich Farmbrough, 21:10, 13 October 2009 (UTC).

Rationale?

What is the rationale for discouraging certain templates to be substed? I recently tagged an article with {{Verylong}}. But while the part of its text "This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably" fit perfectly, the part "Please consider splitting content into sub-articles and using this article for a summary of the key points of the subject" was a ludicrous suggestion for that specific article, one that one should certainly hope would not be followed up by an eager editor. Therefore I substed it so that I could modify the text – which however made it end up in this category. But what's the point? Why do we have this "{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|...}}" preamble for certain templates to start with? Is some harm done by substitution instead of transclusion? And if so, does that apply also to {{Verylong}}?  --Lambiam 07:30, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

You ask a good question. Most of these templates are simply not fit for substitution, which would make problems with the correct dating of these templates. In addition, substitution makes it harder to keep track of the pages a template is used upon. Hope to have answered your question, Debresser (talk) 11:22, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. It's not quite clear to me, though, what the "correct dating" problems are you refer to. One of the effects of {{Verylong}} is to put the thus-tagged page in Category:Articles that may be too long from <MONTH> <YEAR>, also when substed; so it remains easy to keep track of the pages {{Verylong}} has been used on. Is it possible that simply all Ambox templates have been "enriched" with the "{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|...}}" code without consideration of whether this made sense for each individual template?  --Lambiam 19:07, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

• Any changes in the templates themselves wil not be reflected in the articles
  1. style
  2. wording
  3. categorization (for example in the cat name we could take "that may be " out and replace it with "are", another example we currently date a number of tags where we are where likely to break them down by date later - that would be lost).
• The dates. Most people don't fill in the date parameter, leaving it to a WP:Bot.
• Readability - compare "Too long" with the contents of it! And if you did that recursively it would only get worse.
• Having explicit cats in the middle of the article is contrary to style guides.
• The cats will be moved to the end by various processes and consolidated. For example 2 "section expand" might give 1, 2 or 3 categories. When removing one template you would have to know and remember which cats to remove from the article.

Rich Farmbrough, 04:28, 5 May 2010 (UTC).