Thread:Balagog gro-Nolob/@comment-667748-20130427150023/@comment-667748-20130506103400

NO, it's a good question. It is mostly a "keep things simple" thing: If you can cut up everything into simple logical blocks, then they individually become easier to use, which makes things globally easier to use.

If everything is part of one big template, then you start running into bloat problems, both on user and implementation side:
 * Fields start becoming aliased and require numbered names ("name1", "ammount1")
 * Numbered fields start becoming harder to use.
 * Special cases become very hard to handle.

Also, cutting up the template makes things more versatile: Lucky for us, mostly everything in Dark Souls sticks to a same convention, there are no items that "deviate". When deviation *does* occur, that's when you start bloating your template with "switch" parameters. They make things just awful.

If you cut things up, and the standard "row" layout doesn't work, then you can just switch it out for something better. If everything was in the same template, doing it would be much more difficult.

There's no hard rule, of course, but I've seen wikis with incredibly powerful templates. Yes, they were convenient, but at the end of the day, the only ones that knew how to use them, where the ones who wrote them, and that's not right. Anybody should be able to use a template.