Wikipedia:About template mania

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Template mania is the excessive use of templates in thousands of articles. When a template is edited/saved, then all those articles to which the template is transcluded are queued on the wiki-servers to quickly reformat everything affected by changing one template.

By the end of 2008, articles no longer quickly auto-formatted to include the latest versions of template coding. A navbox changed and saved days ago would not appear automatically updated in the transcluding articles, even several days later. However, editing an article caused the latest templates to be used in reformatting when that article was saved.

God forbid that people should start re-editing articles, just to force the invoked templates to be updated sooner.

See also[edit]