In an effort to standardise the appearance of templates on article talk pages, a competition opened last week to come up with a basic visual design for them, ending a brief dispute over one of the affected templates.

The use of template messages has previously prompted concerns about them being misused and overused, with some past efforts trying to encourage placement of templates on talk pages where possible instead of directly on the article. Violet/Riga created a proposal at User talk:Violetriga/statusdevelopment to standardise the look of the current talk page templates throughout Wikipedia after realising they lacked consistent formatting. ALoan commented, "I think bringing some consistency to these templates is a fine idea".

Feeling that the combination of templates for some articles often made talk pages look messy, the proposal aimed to give them more of a table-like look. After some discussion and feedback, Violet/Riga went ahead and implemented this proposal, but an edit war developed focusing primarily on the {{featured}} template. This primarily involved Violet/Riga and JDG, who explained that he didn't like the layout used, claiming that the support for Violet/Riga's proposal was more for the concept of standardisation generally.

At length it was suggested that a competition could be held to satisfy the opinions of both sides. Both editors agreed to this and the affected templates were restored to their previous state. Violet/Riga created a competition page at Wikipedia:Template standardisation, which quickly received a number of submissions, some based on the existing templates and others derived from Violet/Riga's new design.

So far, nine different users have submitted a total of 17 designs for consideration. The competition is scheduled to close Sunday 24 April 2005 at 23:59 (UTC). At that point a public vote will be held to determine the favourite design.