Templates have created a lot of useful new capabilities for users; however,
their abuse has also been blamed for performance hits. I would like to suggest
that a feature be added allowing certain templates to default to being inline
substituted. This could be used for templates like {{sub|2}} = <sub>2</sub>
where the ability to alter the template after its initial use is not really a
virtue. Similarly, it's use could be encouraged for templates that are
basically just user shortcuts, such as used in sigs or in voting, where the
template's use might want to become common but the usefulness of the
transclusion is often low.
Deciding how or when to use such a feature would be used would need to be a
matter of community discussion, but it could help reduce the impact of overly
abundant uses of transclusion, and hence presumably benefit the servers (unless
of course all of you developers have some other solution for stoping templates
from being blamed for performance hits).
In my view, the easiest way to implement this might be to create some tag
analogous to "NOTOC" that could be added to the template ("SUBST"
perhaps?) and which the code would interpret to mean that {{foo}} should be
replaced with the effect of {{subst:foo}} whenever a user enters it into an edit
box.
Best wishes, and thanks for a great Mediawiki experience.
-DF
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement