Template talk:ChapterPages

Not needed
What is the purpose of this template? As far as I can see it's used to display the number of pages of a chapter. However, this is only displayed on the chapter page. What's the difference then to just add the number of pages to the chapter infobox then? If the number of pages was shown on different pages other than the chapter's page, I would understand more the need for this template, but since that's not the case, this is an unnecessary roundabout way to add a simple information to an infobox. Keep in mind that the whole template is loaded for each page, it might not change much, but it's still a waste of resources.

I remember seeing other templates like this one, but if using the template is equivalent to adding the information to the infobox, then it's not needed. Please avoid creating templates like this, they only make updating pages more difficult for inexperienced users.

Isn't that true for the majority of infoboxes templates? Rhavkin (talk) 18:08, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure which templates you mean, but if you mean Category:Chapter Box Templates, I do not understand why those templates were created beside Which volume. Maybe the others were created following that, but I'll try to explain the difference: the purpose of Which volume is to display to which volume a chapter belongs to and it was created to avoid updating every chapter page or reference used on the wiki (references lists the volume and chapter) each time a new volume comes out. Now that might be sound similar to this one, ChapterPages, but what does ChapterPages do? It displays the number of pages that a chapter has, but that information is used only on one page. How many pages chapter 900 has will only be shown on chapter 900, but if that's the case, what is the purpose of creating a template, which is a giant array of 1000 parameters, which is then loaded to every chapter page? Please explain to me the benefit of creating such giant array of elements that have to be loaded on every template call over simply adding the number of pages in the chapter infobox. The number of pages of a chapter has to be added every time regardless that you do to an infobox or this template, so what is the point of this? To make a comparison, this template is the equivalent of removing the alias from the character infoboxes and putting them all in a single giant template which then checks "if the page is XXX, then display these aliases"... why would you do that?

There is also a technical concern that template parameters have limits. I'm not sure which they are, but this template uses a switch with 1000 parameters, it wouldn't be surprising if at some point it wouldn't work anymore.