Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-45310000-20200415125300/@comment-45310000-20200416172100

Tupka217 wrote: And {{Lchar|? Nope. Go for {{C|. {{W| for Weapon, {{P| for place. Et cetera. If you have to do it so often, you don't want to type the long thing every time. You might even go for a more elaborate template parent template {{L| or something (for link) that uses parser functions to #explode: the pagename into the part before the and link it accordingly.

I'm going to have to respectfully differ with you here. I find this situation analogous to code like C/C++ being written in a shared environment. If you are that guy that likes to write really terse code with one letter parameter and variable names, and leave behind very little documentation in the way of comments, then your code becomes a nightmare for someone else to maintain when you aren't around to explain it. I'd have this happen with my own code that I'd like to reuse, 5 or 10 years down the line, I'll look at it and think to myself, WTF was this dude trying to do right here?

You can use really short names, but I would feel compelled to write out the purpose at each run of uses of the really short name in a code comment, which in the end is counter-productive than simply using a more verbose name not requiring a comment.

A body of wikitext should be considered analogous to a shared coding environment, where other coders have to go in behind you and maintain code, and if you are not around to explain it, then it is more likely that your code ends up edited out and completely rewritten rather than respected for the terse masterpiece of brilliance that you think it is.

I am probably going to maintain this wikitext by have a bot come through and replace the shorter names with the verbose names for link generation, to aid in clarity for new editors. If they RTFM, they will realize that shorter names are available to aid in rapid article writing when done from the source editor.

Just saying...

(edit: but your one L template idea is very good, and I'll probably end up implementing that.)