Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-08-14/Humour

Good afternoon. Hello there! I'm a template... an English Wikipedia template, yes.

Are you sure it's me you're after, friend?

Ah, I suppose it's just as well — it's just been years since anybody came out to see me. Well, then, what would you like? You need a string formatted? Sure thing. I've got just the code to do it. You want the input string cut in half? No problem. Let me just—ah. Tarnation! My back...

No, it's okay. I'm all well. I just can't parse like I used to. Just give me a moment and I'll... what's that, friend? A backslash? Ohh, now that's a tough one. I have to say I can't recall how those are supposed to... hmm... no, listen here, I said I'm fine. Just give me a minute, will you? You can sit down over there if you please. Would you like a cup of tea?

You know, you might not believe it, but I used to be one of the most used templates on this whole site. I was protected. Heck – I was cascade-protected. Now, back in those days, the way they did that was that one admin had a subpage of a subpage of a userpage and... ah, never mind. It doesn't matter anymore. The point is, well, there are six or seven million articles now, ye? There were just a million in those days, and about half of those had some kind of template on them that would call on yours truly. And I'd chop off the namespace names, or the root page names – this was before {{ROOTPAGENAMEE}}, mind you – didn't matter to me, it was all honest work.

Sometimes you'd get some codeface vandal who would use me to spell out curse words. The old Scunthorpe bit. Now of course I didn't like that, but when you're a template you parse the input and you return the output, it was all the same to me. Now, this was in the very old days, of course. We didn't have anything else! It was just me out there with my own arms and legs. We didn't have steam engines or gasoline, it was just me and maybe a plow horse if I was lucky. The templates these days don't even know what it was like. But I won't complain, back in those days you could just chop up your strings and get three square meals out of it, and a pension to boot. I feel bad for the whippersnappers out there. My son's a template too — I taught him everything I know — and he's got a real natural knack for splitting strings too. But from what he tells me it's a plum different game out there now. You've got no guarantees nowadays. You've got to pay attention to all this stuff — test cases, sandboxes, expensive parser functions — back in my day we just put in a day's work and were done with it!

In fact, that reminds me – if you really want to get a great heap of strings split up, you should go see my son. Why, he can split seven hundred strings in the time it takes me to split one. They wrote him with that newfangled scripting language. I'm so proud of him! I'll finish this one for you, and you can go see him instead – my arms are already getting tired.

Well, thank you for stopping by anyway, friend. I do live a comfortable life now, so it's not often I get a chance to get back in the old boots. At the very least, you got your strings split, and I've got something to tell my son about tomorrow when he comes to visit. Now I could use another cup of tea — would you like one as well? If you're going to be traveling it's good to have something to keep you warm.

I tell you what: it's not easy when you get to be seventeen years old.