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The issue of template mania had escalated during 2008, with templates included in thousands of articles, often using one template in over 5,000 articles (or perhaps 45,000 articles). When a template was edited/saved, then all those "5,000" articles were queued on the wiki-servers to quickly reformat everything affected by changing one template. If a template was used in 400 articles, they would all be reformatted, typically, within 3–6 minutes (after the template was saved).

By the end of 2008, articles no longer quickly auto-formatted to include the latest versions of template coding. A navbox changed and saved days ago would not appear automatically updated in the transcluding articles, even several days later. However, editing an article caused the latest templates to be used in reformatting when that article was saved.

God forbid that people should start re-editing articles, just to force the invoked templates to be updated sooner.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Overlink crisis – February 2008 essay about limiting size or scope of navboxes