Last modified: 2010-05-15 15:28:18 UTC
I would like to have a better way to specify default values for template paramteres. I would suggest the syntax {{{1|foobar}}} to make "foobar" the default value for the first anonymous parameter. However, this may not work for the rather common case that you want to use {{PAGENAME}} as the default: {{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} may confuse the praser... but a similar syntax could probably be found. The reason is that the current approach, namely using Template:xyz as the default-value for {{{xyz}}} is counter intuitive and leads to a great many "useless" templates. Also, this does not work for anonymous parameters, as there can be only on Template:1. Also, each template has to be careful not to use parameter names already used by another template - that's hard to maintain and leads to long and/or cryptic parameter names.
Note: this Bug is related to but not the same as #364.
Firstly, note that the current behaviour *isn't* to use Template:xyz as the default value for {{{xyz}}}; there is simply a dubious behaviour in the parser (seemingly fixed in CVS) that makes it see "{{{xyz}}}" as "{" + "{{xyz}}" + "}", and thus include a template. Secondly, I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of bug 364 after all, because I think they are both requesting the same feature, just describing it differently; for a more complete explanation, see my comments there. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 364 ***
