Monster Templates

So in other words, we will need to keep the number of revisions down to a minimum.

MediaWiki 1.17 does have some performance enhancements. But I don't know if it has anything to do with templates. How Wikipedia deals with this type of problem is to use cache files and not updated them immediately, but instead wait until traffic is low to do the update. We still have the purge function in case we need to update a single page. Still I like to see the site upgraded to at least 1.17, if not 1.18. Then we can use {{urlencode:string|WIKI}} to give a more consistent output. But I'm guessing that you have no control over that.