CZ Talk:Templates

Todo

Hey Robert, Be sure to mark unused templates for deletion. (Or, feel free to delete them if you have permissions to do so.) --Larry Sanger 12:07, 22 December 2007 (CST)

I'm eventually going to do that after I sort them. --Robert W King 12:37, 22 December 2007 (CST)

I think I'm pretty much done with media templates. Stephen Ewen 01:47, 23 December 2007 (CST)

Also the constabulary templates. Stephen Ewen 01:47, 23 December 2007 (CST)

Nice work here. Once I'm done grading I am going to try and upgrade the subpages template and then delete all the unnecesary stuff. When that is finished I'll write a description to descripe the functions of each tempalte, maybe draw a diagram too.. Chris Day (talk) 02:34, 23 December 2007 (CST)

One suggestion is to organize content-oriented templates by Workgroup. Another idea is to create a new Workgroup called the CZ:Technical Team Workgroup and place all of the design-oriented templates in it, such as for subpages. Stephen Ewen 23:22, 23 December 2007 (CST)

BTW, most of the technical team already functions as a workgroup. ;-) This idea would just formalize it and open it up some, plus be helpful for recruiting. Stephen Ewen 23:24, 23 December 2007 (CST)

More rationale for Technical Team Workgroup

• Basically, under the Technical Lead, the workgroup would be a place to coordinate development of the software, inclusive of design, upon which CZ runs. Currently this is handled too much off-wiki, so it is not very newcomer-friendly (you pretty much gotta be "in the know" right now).
• Workgroup would be responsible over Technical help pages, like CZ:Treeview Extension, and other such.
• Would be a place contributors can go to for template creation and design help, e.g., "I need help making a template that features V, W, X, Y and Z for the Catalog of Gold Medalist Couples Figure Skaters".
• Would be a "home" for project-wide templates that merely organizes content, e.g., {{Subpages}}.
• Basically, if it makes the software or some design feature or user-friendliness feature of it better, this it the home for it, e.g., CZ:How to start a new article, and even the CZ:Upload-Wizard.

Stephen Ewen 00:46, 25 December 2007 (CST)

Phases for CZ:Templates

• Phase 1- Identify templates Completed.
• Phase 2- Sort/Seperate THE END IS IN VIEW!!!
  • Phase 2a - Sort by function groups
• Phase 3- Document template functionality
  • 3A- Create "Template Docmentation Template" to be used when creating new templates Done in advance.
  • 3B- Document process behind 3A
• Phase 4- Create guidelines for new templates
• Phase 5-

Overlap

There seems to be a certain amount of overlap between "Infoboxes", "Formatting" (subgroup 'data display') and "Navigation" (subgroup 'inside CZ'). Please note that this precedes my recent attempt to add a bit more structure, which did not (in general) move stuff among these three groups a lot.

I would suggest the following rules for which goes where, and if these are acceptable, we can sort things into these three bins on these criteria:

• 'Infoboxes' should contains all templates which are intended to display data about the current subject. So, e.g. {{Virus taxon}} would be there, not in 'Formatting'.
• 'Formatting' would be used to hold templates used to display individual instances of generic data-types, in a common format across articles. So things like {{Height}}, {{Utc}} would go there.
• 'Navigation' would hold templates intended to allow navigation among groups of articles, so things like {{Editor Policy}} and {{Constellations_iau}} would go there.

Sure, this won't be perfect, but it will give us some guidelines as to what goes where. J. Noel Chiappa 17:24, 2 June 2008 (CDT)

Suggestions / Questions here

Will phase one be needed to be reviewed periodically in case someone makes a template under the radar? Is there a bot for scanning or something? I don't know how these things work. Tom Kelly 14:00, 3 June 2008 (CDT)

Comments

Brilliant! This makes so much sense and will be extremely useful. Tom Kelly 13:59, 3 June 2008 (CDT)

--Robert W King 11:44, 9 January 2008 (CST)

Treeview

Treeview extension seems to be messing the page up, showing "<treeview449fed0537e129 id='49fed0537e129'>*Infobox series " etc rather than treeviews. Will it be fixed or should code for it be removed from the page? Caesar Schinas 11:28, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

What code update is needed to make it work again? Chris Day 14:39, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Not sure, I'm afraid. Caesar Schinas 15:31, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Documentation

At the moment two completely different methods of adding documentation are mentioned and used.
I propose that one be chosen and stuck to. I suggest {{TlDoc}}, which has several advantages due to the documentation being kept on a subpage of the documented template.
A few advantages are :

• The template page is simplified, giving less scope for error when editing complex templates with complex examples.
• The documentation can be maintained without the risk of damaging the template.
• The size of the template page is reduced.

If nobody objects I will change the instructions accordingly. Caesar Schinas 17:29, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Go for it, I think that one is the more commonly used, and prefered one. Chris Day 17:42, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Alright, thanks Chris, I'll go ahead.

By the way, do you know if its possible to get {{TlDoc}} unprotected? It seems to be because its referenced from the {{subpages}} system.

Caesar Schinas 17:48, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Try now. Chris Day 18:02, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Chris, working fine now. Caesar Schinas 10:18, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

{{Test-template}}

I'm eager to suggest the deletion of Template:Test-template (have a look and see why)...
However, it is used on many, many, image pages.
As I see it, its usage on these image pages will only confuse and detract from the profesional appearance of CZ - but I presume they're there for some reason???
Can anyone enlighten me, or give me their opinion at least?
Caesar Schinas 16:12, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, it's not quite as many as I thought... seems to be 55. Caesar Schinas 16:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

As I see it, when Stephen Ewan was writing the code for the upload wizard he did not finish it completely. Primarily the drop down menu (doing this from memory) for self made images has dummy options for the license. Speculating from here, i assume Stephen also set up a dummy copy right template while testing. I know Joe Quick has mentioned fixing this before (here too). At the time I had not realised the problem extended beyond the drop down menus. Chris Day 16:23, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Hmm... I thought it was probably something to do with the unfinished upload wizard; but hadn't got round to checking.

Even if the upload wizard were to be fixed, I don't know what we could do about the images which already use this template - it would have to be removed from each individually.

And while the upload wizard is still like that, more and more images are going to end up with the "blah blah" template on them. I don't have permissions for it (Special: namespace - not sure if it's even a wiki page, actually, or static HTML or something...), but can the form be modified to stop thes options from adding the template?

Regarding the images which already have this template on them; would they be any worse with a broken template link instead? ;-D (I actually think it might be better - "blah blah" doesn't give the impression of caring much about copyright on those images, does it?

What I'm getting at is - should the template be deleted? Or should it have some more descriptive text added - something about a work in progress? It's not a very good name for the template, anyway.

Caesar Schinas 17:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree the broken link is better than blah blah blah. Chris Day 17:13, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Furthermore, I suggest we leave that broken link there, for now, so we can find the images that need the a new copyright template. Chris Day 17:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Good; thanks for the deletion. Caesar Schinas 17:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

problematic

Just thinking aloud. One drawback of having the metadata as a template is that they swamp the search for other templates (especially for ones we do not know about). As metadata pages will never have a discussion page (or at least i don't see a need) maybe we should actively encourage people to create a talk page for each template. Then at least we can see all the templates by looking at all pages in the template talk domain. Or is there an easier way? Chris Day 16:48, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

If you're talking about the Template:PAGENAME/Metadata pages, I absolutely agree. I hate the way these go in the template namespace. I can think of a tonne of better places... but it would be a lot of work to move it now, unless someone with access to the database was willing to do it in an automated fashion (I expect this would be quite easy, but haven't given it much thought and am not familiar with the internals of MediaWiki).

But don't like the talk page "hack"... Perhaps a category for all "genuine" templates? That could be added to the preload page for {{TlDoc}}, so it would go onto new pages automatically.

I wonder... there just might be a way to filter the list of pages in the Template namespace to not include subpages. But probably not.

I'll think about it.

Caesar Schinas

Category is a better solution, was not really thinking too hard. There is a historical reason for metadata being in the template space. Originally we tried having metadata on PAGENAME/Metadata subpage but it did not work for various technical reasons (I'll have to find the old discussions, I forget the reason now). Actually, the original reason we could not do it might not even exist now we have the new processor. I think we also discussed a Metadata namespace. Another alternative was to have Template:Metadata/PAGENAME format. That too did not work, and again, I forget why. At least in that scenario all the metadata templates would have grouped together in one block. Chris Day 17:23, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah; a Metadata namespace is my preferred method. Can't think of any reason for that not to work, but I'll take your word for it. :-)

I can't find any way of excluding them from the search.

Will keep thinking.

Caesar Schinas 17:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

The category already exists. Nothing it it yet... Caesar Schinas 17:31, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

And we could create subcategories; eg Category:Templates/Infoboxes, etc. (I think that's better than just Category:Infoboxes; don't you? Caesar Schinas 17:45, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

But... that would make it harder (or impossible) to automate the addition of categories to new templates. Still might be better, though. Most could go in subcategories, at least. Caesar Schinas 17:47, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

As far as I know a metadata namespace would work but it was technically impossible, for me at least, to do it and then we got locked into the less desirable state. Possibly now is the time to rethink. Another reason was that i never really thought that the subpages template would still be used at this point, I thought it would all be coded into the mediawiki and that the metadata would live where ever those programers thought best. Ideally we should still move in that direction since as we get more and more pages using the {{subpages}} template it becomes a weak link (and takes more processing time to make changes to it). Also, it should mean that editing the metadata becomes more user friendly with drop down menus etc. I assume this is all possible for someone familiar with programming?Chris Day 18:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Well... it is all possible for someone familiar with programming PHP, but they would ideally need to already be familiar with MediaWiki, and they would need access to the servers on which CZ is hosted. I don't know how many people have this access. Obviously Larry Sanger does...

For the creation of a Metadata namespace, access to the server is also required.

We must bear in mind in the consideration of a solution that the Template:PAGENAME/Metadata pages aren't the only metadata pages. Most images also have a Template:IMAGENAME/credits page, too.

Caesar Schinas 05:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't have the time now, but at some point in the future I could create an extension to do this. But I wouldn't want to spend the time unless I could be assured that it would actually be used... Caesar Schinas 06:00, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, there are quite a few metadata pages with their own talk pages, anyway. Caesar Schinas 09:57, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Citation Templates

There are far too many citation templates; some consolidation is desperately needed.
There is a vast amount of overlap, for example, between {{citation}}, {{cite book}}, and even {{cite encyclopedia}}.
Not being sure of exactly what the norms are for citations, I'm unwilling to just go and merge half these templates without some discussion first.
Any opinions? Caesar Schinas 07:25, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, too many. Problem here is that much has been imported from wikipedia. Daniel Mietchen is trying to make this more coherent. We should try figure out what we need and write our own version. Chris Day 17:07, 18 May 2009 (UTC)