The answer is, as usual, "it depends". But with these cleanup templates a number of bots add the date parameter, so the extra work is negligable. And having the bots do it means you don't get things like "Devember" as I typed earlier today, or more subtley "december"- lower case "d". Also if you add a named parameter to a template and it is unused, it doesn't matter, as you hint above.  Farmbrough, 15:17 7  December 2006 (GMT).