Board Thread:Site Discussions/@comment-4533965-20151211224158

Hello one and all. I've noticed that the new templates across the wiki look pretty impressive and all and work definitely well for the mobile site wiki skin... but it isn't something we should keep. Let me make this short: the new templates either have to be reworked or scrapped.

Templates across different wikis are stylized in the same theme as the franchise, with a quote from a certain subject of that franchise being used on the template to give an idea (i.e. Wookieepedia's future product template compared to ours). I'm gonna be real honest here in that I don't like the bland-styled template designs on here. I miss the Silver icon on the template. I miss having the stub templates being more creative than this (let me remind you that we have several templates that literally are almost 'identical to the Stub/Characters template). We should be more creative, this is a wiki about a blue hedgehog that goes fast after all.

Second, the design of the infoboxes. I am not fond of any of the current, mobile-designed templates for two specific reasons:


 * 1. It's too bland. They all look the same, with the only real difference being what template it is. And even then, the only real way to distinguish it is by legitimately editing the article, which shouldn't be that hard. I miss the original, different-colored infoboxes we had that helped readers (and editors) tell the difference between a character infobox and a location infobox.
 * 2. When you look at the article in a category, the main image doesn't show up, by rather, the second image that appears is shown. Yes, it's a minor problem, and no, this shouldn't happen. Readers should be able to look at the category and find out which article is which immediately by looking at the image. It's more convenient, and these new infoboxes hinder that.
 * And 3. It makes adding more information in an infobox more tedious. We can no longer simply edit the infobox via visual mode, oh no. You want to add an infobox? Well, you can't add anything in visual mode because there's no option for it! That means you have two choices: you can either copy down all of the source mode from the actual template page and paste it down on the article (which you shouldn't have to do) or you can copy down the source from another article in source mode (again, something you shouldn't have to do).

Overall, these templates either need to be reworked greatly or reverted back to normal. I, for one, cannot stand the bland, new templates that were supposed to help mobile sites when, in reality, they remain literally the same as before when looking at the wiki on mobile platforms. They don't do any justice whatsoever. Sorry for sounding rude, but I'm just not in favor of these templates, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. 