Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-24473195-20150630184324

Vengir wrote: I'd say that having to repeat that is better. Why? Consider your example A. So you would want the "soldiers" variable to defaul to "0" and then format in accordance to "format" tag, right. Well, then your infobox will have "0" linked. Chances are, that page will never be created. Also, as I mentioned, some users might not want to duplicate what's in format into default value. They would need another tag for their needs (or perhaps some extra parser functions or lua). Repetition is almost always bad, for many reasons:


 * Repeating a section requires copying and checking of all copies are the same


 * There's a good chance that mistakes will be made


 * It makes the coder harder to maintain and less readable


 * Making changes requires changing every single section

The default tag's role is to specify a default value, not format it. The way we used default so far was a hack not its intended functionality. Format tags are meant to change the presentation of the content, nothing more nothing less.

If you look at infoboxes in popular wikias, you'll note that at least 30% of the code is repetition, variables being repeated, parserfunctions being overused, and so forth. I'm sure even the admins in these wikias shudder at the prospect of making changes in them.