Additional thoughts - copied from En Wikipedia. Pam has done a ton of work with templates in VE and is at this point pretty dead familiar with how it impacts her workflow.

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Many of the templates I add most often either have no parameters (eg stub templates), or take "date" as a parameter (maintenance templates like {{unref}}), or take one or more positional parameters (eg {{in title}} or {{about}} or {{coord}}).

The handling of templates seems to assume that each template has one or more named parameters.

Inputting a 3-parameter template like {{about|this|that|the other}} is very tedious, even after you've discovered how to do it (very non-intuitive). You can't see the content of previous parameters as you go along, so have to remember where you've got to. Messy and stressful and takes a whole lot of clicking.

It's probably too late to suggest this, but imagine the following scenario:
1. I click on the jigsaw icon
2. A box appears where I input the name of the template and click "Add template"
3. The next box includes a prominent "See template documentation" button which links to the appropriate documentation, perhaps popping it up in another window or tab.
4. This box is divided into two columns and a note says "use either the left-hand or right-hand column to add any parameters to this template". One col has named parameters, the other has a set of boxes labelled "1st parameter", "2nd parameter", etc. Along with buttons for "Next template" and "Apply changes".

A further refinement would be for VE to be aware of (a) templates which take no parameters (eg stub templates), and (b) templates which only take the date (many maintenance templates), and in these two cases not to prompt for parameters (but to quietly add the date for (b), saving this having to be done by a passing bot later).

A yet further refinement would be for VE to recognise stub templates (they all end in "-stub}}", apart from {{stub}} itself, so it shouldn't be hard), offer them as a separate drop-down menu (much easier when stub-sorting), and put them in the "right" (per WP:MOS) place at the end of the article.

Probably too much to hope for: but going back to the basics, please work out a way for parameters to be input without all the clicks involved in making "names" like "1", "2", etc. I haven't yet tried to add a coords parameter - something on the lines of {{coord|54|36|51|N|2|49|34|W|display=title}}. That's going to be really tedious.

... Getting a bit stream-of-consciousness here: can't we just have two columns of boxes: "parameter name if any" and "parameter contents" - perhaps 10 rows and a "More parameters" button. Then to input that coord template I'd just leave the first column blank and put the values I've got, in order, and hit "Apply changes". Simple, allows you to see previous params as you go to keep track of where you've got to, etc. Ah well, perhaps it's all in hand. Good luck. PamD 14:12, 4 July 2013 (UTC)