Template talk:Documentation

Template:Documentation
Can someone explain to me what Template:Documentation is useful for, and point me to where consensus was achieved to create it? LtPowers (talk) 03:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It's a fairly standard mechanism across WMF wikis for providing documentation (explaining how a template is to be used). Keeping documentation in a subpage means the main template can be protected while still allowing editors to add interwiki links and categories to the template (via an includeonly section in the /doc subpage). This, that and the other (talk) 03:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * We essentially never use protection, so that's rather a moot point. Anything else?  LtPowers (talk) 15:25, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * We actually have seven protected templates: . Aside from that, I like this documentation approach for two reasons: following organizational norms from WMF projects will make integration between the projects easier, and it also provides a standardized way for documenting template usage.  In the past we've documented usage on the template page, on the template talk page, etc.  Particularly when documenting on the template page there is confusion with noinclude/includeonly, how to ensure that categories added by the template aren't applied when demonstrating template usage, etc.  Flipping your question around, is there some particular downside to using this approach to document template usage? -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 16:34, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It's complex and confusing to novices. Every template, including Template:Documentation has to be documented and maintained, so it's yet another thing to keep track of.  LtPowers (talk) 18:28, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * We'll have to agree to disagree on that point - I think the documentation template is a far simpler and less confusing way of doing template documentation and a far superior way to organize that documentation. -- Ryan &bull; (talk) &bull; 18:39, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * "It's a fairly standard mechanism across WMF wikis for providing documentation" -> No, it is a standard way of how the English Wikipedia is doing that, and also tries to import on other projects like it are colonies. I know a lot of other projects which don't like the way the English Wikipedia does it and use their own simple system. The big reason for that is that the English Wikipedia makes it difficult when making it easy is possible as well. Romaine (talk) 23:34, 16 December 2012 (UTC)