Editing Template talk:Error (section)

== I wish this was more widely known ==

As on occasional writer of templates (and long-time software engineer) I like to make them "fail gracefully" when given bad input. (Of course that's not always possible given the limitations of the template language, but at least one can try rather than produce incomprehensible output.) So this template is really great! But I wish I had known about it before. It seems to me, there are a lot of good templates out there that are very hard to find: a problem with Wikipedia generally actually; one tends to be able to find something if one knows what one is looking for, which rather defeats the point.

So, thanks for this, now I know it exists I will use it! (And I know any reply would probably start "er, it's called error, it's pretty obvious", but that's not the problem which is not "what does {{tlc|error}} do?" but "what do I do to produce error output?"). [[User:SimonTrew|Si Trew]] ([[User talk:SimonTrew|talk]]) 10:33, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

: I know what you mean. I wrote this template to try and generalize all errors. As afar as I can tell not too many others have started using it, unfortunately. Another similar problem is that I frequently stumble upon multiple templates that do essentially the same thing.
:I think the best way to solve this, would be to have an up-to-date list of templates by category that includes name and a short description. I do not believe it will be easy to find somebody to create it and I think it will be even harder to maintain.
: One contributing factor to this wild growth of templates is that people copy templates from other languages and translate the names in various ways. So, you could end up with multiple copies of the same template (for example: "sizeof_string", "string_size", "char_count" and "string_length").
: Anyway, glad you like it :D &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;— [[User:SkyLined|<span style="font-family: monospace, monospace; color:#008000;">SkyLined</span>]] <small>([[User_talk:SkyLined|talk]])</small> 14:07, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

::Yeah, it's not so much a question of my saying "how do I get it in red and so on", like I can do <code><span style="color:red"> ... </span></code> and all that, but I always have this feeling that somewhere, probably more than once, someone ''must have done this already'', leading either to searching (usually with futility) a load of existing templates that ''appear'' to do something similar but are not coded to be reused. And the search does just seem inadequate at finding these things.

::For example, I've just created {{tlx|Ety}} which wants to output a list of stuff, like "Tom, Dick and Harry". Surely somewhere there is a kinda {{tlc|englist}} or something that will separate its parameters with commas or "&nbsp;and&nbsp;"? Not that I can find. So I end up writing {{tlx|Ety/List}} in the full knowledge I am reinventing the wheel. I had a similar feeling with {{tlx|Cardinal to word}} and its brethren.

::I think it would be much improved if there were a Good Template Review kinda process that asked questions: is it documented? does it do what it says it does? Does it fail gracefully on bad input? (Not many do.) And so on. That way, the kinda "library" you envisaged could at least be started on with kinda "templates we like and trust". A lot seen to have been put together by people who know how to write templates but don't bother to document them, so that they end up almost impossible to reuse (there's a greater tendency to make breaking changes, too). [[User:SimonTrew|Si Trew]] ([[User talk:SimonTrew|talk]]) 14:59, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

: FWIW, I always categorize my meta templates in [[:Category:Wikipedia metatemplates]] or below, which has a number of interesting templates. But the categorization could sure be improved, it's still quite a mishmash to keep {{tl|ROOTPAGENAME}}, {{tl|Navbox}}, and {{tl|Television in Europe templates}} in the same category. {{mono|:\}}<br>[[User talk:Amalthea|<span style="font-variant:small-caps;color:#832">Amalthea</span>]] 16:04, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

::I don't really know what you mean by a metatemplate. If you mean just a template that is used by other templates, I don't know that that is always appropriate. I can see that "Television in Europe templates" is, indeed, a metatemplate in that it a template that ''describes'' templates, but ''Navbox'' seems more a "base class" and ROOTPAGENAME well, who knows? Just seems like a normal template to me. [[User:SimonTrew|Si Trew]] ([[User talk:SimonTrew|talk]]) 16:30, 29 June 2010 (UTC)