This is a draft. Feel free to edit or contribute.
Comment: Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in template deletion discussions has since been created.
Arguments to watch out for in TfD discussions edit
- unused
- By itself, this is not enough for deletion. It must be demonstrated that the template isn't likely to be used. See also below.
- unused for three years
- What better benchmark for the likelihood of a template to be used in the future than the instances it was used in the past? This should be treated with common sense. Does the template have enough incoming links from help or project pages, or the "see also" sections of similar, but more widely used templates? If not, then probably no-one knows about the template and that's why it hasn't been used. Again, its likely usefulness has to be examined.
For templates like this there might exist possible merge targets: if no-one knew about the template it is possible that someone saw the need for it and created another template that does the same job.
There are other reasons a template might not have any transclusions. Occasionally it happens that a template is used but at some point an editor decides they don't like it, they remove all instances of the template, and a few months later another editor comes and gets it deleted as unused.
- hard-coded instance of
{{cite something}} - First, there are over a thousand such templates and many are very widely used. It's worth bearing in mind that it's not only a question of frequency of use but also of the ease of producing the citation. Most items are easy to get a citation for out of a library catalogue or a bibliography database using reference management software. But there are others, particularly reference works turned into online databases, that are difficult to automatically get a citation for. Producing a proper
{{cite something}}for them can be extremely fussy. If a template saves this effort even to a single editor every year, it is useful and should be kept.
General notes edit
- Sometimes it's overall much more effort to persuade for the keeping of a template at TfD than to let a future editor recreate it from scratch if it's deleted.