Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Language codes in templates/reply (10)

The difference to me is that "every edit" can either cover individual edits or mass bot-work. You are obviously a skilled bot user and have done a lot of useful stuff, but if you are going to do it in handfuls of 1,000 entries then consensus becomes more of a big deal. As I said in the first post of this thread) for those who only edit manually, it can seem as though things keep getting pointlessly longer and fiddlier. Remember when we could put "cooking" instead of "context|cooking|lang=en"? I still miss that!

Sure it's important to have semantic markup, as this will lead us towards entries that are meaningful in themselves, but I don't think it's something that we should have to type ourselves on every edit. If we can't have sensible defaults, maybe we need a better editing facility, or some remote robotic arms (i.e. type an entry in simple markup and then some electronic middleman-entity fills in the missing, but required, details).

I think there is a very real risk that we end up with such a ton of template spaghetti that it gets in the way of the everyday editor who just wants to be able to define a damn word. And I say this as someone who used to work as a coder and is fairly familiar with regular expressions and FSAs and such. There's a time and a place...

I'm not saying don't do it. Just when it's a mass event then I wish you'd check with the rest of us first. I am not taking sides and I think you are both valuable editors but I can see why Dan sometimes feels the need to get militant about reversions in the face of this. k i'll shut up now