Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Mobile Page Issues/Flow

There are about 700 uses of ambox in the mainspace at the English Wikivoyage, including:

• 323 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Translate
• 222 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Style
• 67 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Movetocity
• 35 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Movetodistrict
• 24 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Merge
• 15 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Regions_discussion
• 8 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Districts_discussion
• 4 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Crop
• 3 are https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Transcription

IMO approximately none of these matter to non-editing readers, unless perhaps you can read whatever language is listed in the "translate" template, and you didn't know that a Wikivoyage existed in that language.

A few, such as https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Copyvio are about serious editing problems, but there are typically few or none in the mainspace at any given point in time. Additionally, templates such as https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Template:Side_box use the mbox classes and might be affected.

I'm not sure that this project will provide any tangible benefit to readers of the English Wikivoyage.

re: "matter to non-editing readers" - part of the idea of these amboxes, has always been that they entice readers to become editors. (We were all just readers, once upon a time!).

A second part of the idea, is that they help remind (or teach) readers that they're looking at a massively collaborative project which is a constant work-in-progress (i.e. that they should always seek external confirmation before relying on information within).

A third part is that they show how open we are about our flaws, which implicitly encourages readers to both tag any flaws that they find themselves, and also leads to greater overall respect in the work because of the helpful transparency.

I don't recall ever seeing any evidence that this effort at "enticement" is effective.

Most of the arguments I've seen at enwiki about this are all about "we have to warn the readers about this article!" even though maintenance templates (with the reasonable exception of Template:Hoax) are officially not supposed to warn the readers about anything.

(That is basically my question at Topic:Ughiujdu59it47bc.)