Help talk:Introduction/main sandbox

Category link

BrownHairedGirl, thanks for clarifying where you came to this page from. Looking at Special:WantedCategories, I see at least one other example of a perpetually redlinked category, Category:Wikipedians with red-linked categories on their user talk page. If that category is okay, I would think that this one would be as well, since it certainly has more value to the project (helping new editors learn how categories work, as opposed to just being a joke). Special:WantedCategories is a pretty niche page, so I'd hope that anyone there would be able to see pretty easily that Category:Example category isn't actually a category that needs to be created. It doesn't seem worth it to refrain from something beneficial just because a metric tool isn't capable of fully handling it (I'm assuming there's no way to manually unlist pages from Special:WantedCategories). Alternatively, we could actually create it, but then it'd be basically a list of all the users who have gone through the tutorial, which might come across as weird to some. Or if people keep accidentally creating it, we could request it be fully salted. But I don't see any way to easily demonstrate what a live category looks like in wikitext and on a page without actually using a category. WP:REDNOT and WP:USERNOCAT have very little relevance to this highly atypical situation; going by them would be very WP:BURO. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:22, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: on the contrary, this is a highly typical situation .. and you are encouraging users to adopt bad practice.

Per WP:USERNOCAT/WP:DRAFTNOCAT, use sandboxes should not be in content categories. Preceding category names with a colon ([[:Category:Example category]]) is precisely how all editors should be adding categories to user sandbox pages.

Many editors make that mistake, so every update of Special:WantedCategories contains user sandbox pages which are incorrectly included in red-linked categories ... and editors have to manually add the preceding colon, to remove the categories.

Many sandbox pages are in existing categories, so they don't show up in SWC ... but even though there isn't systematised tracking of those errors, they are still wrong, and many editors use the script User:DannyS712/Draft no cat to convert them to links.

This is not "bureaucracy"; this is to ensure that readers browsing content categories don't find draft pages in the category lists.

Please stop encouraging editors to adopt bad practice, and please stop encouraging editors to dump errors in Special:WantedCategories. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:19, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, your concern that people might take the example category as license to add content categories is valid. I'd be fine with adding a hidden comment telling people not to add any actual categories so as to not disrupt things. But with that, I can't see a good reason to avoid adding Category:Example category. WP:USERNOCAT and WP:DRAFTNOCAT are both explicit that they apply only to content categories, and Category:Example category is definitely not that, so I don't see any issue there. WP:REDNOT is the guideline this would "violate", but there's a reason it (like all guidelines) has the occasional exceptions may apply disclaimer at the top. If your position is that redlinked categories must never ever exist to keep Special:WantedCategories as clean as possible, good luck trying to remove the instances of Category:Wikipedians with red-linked categories on their user talk page. I view this more from the fundamentals: the tradeoff of better helping new users at the expense of adding one item to Special:WantedCategories seems very much worth it. Would the compromise of having it with a hidden comment next to it be alright with you? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 07:54, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: Special:WantedCategories is a cleanup list, and cleanup lists should be capable of being cleaned up. They should not be cluttered with permanent entries. (And please don't get me started with Category:Wikipedians with red-linked categories on their user talk page. It took a massive, prolonged battle to consolidate many dozens of such pointless categories to those two, thereby making SWC usable again. The fact that a very small number of highly vocal editors remain selfish enough to continue to insist on dumping their "joke" in a cleanup page is not a licence to dump more crud there.)

So if a live category is added, it should be a existing category.

However ... even using a category which actually exists still leaves the question of why you want to create an example of bad practice. You want to focus on the fundamentals, and the fundamentals here are simple: Categories on a sandbox page should be disabled, so that's the example that should be provided.

You say that there is the tradeoff of better helping new users, but helping to adopt bad practice is precisely the opposite of what we should be doing. So this is not a tradeoff of a good vs a bad; it is a bad plus a bad. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:36, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Page is or is not a Sandbox

Is this page a sandbox, or not? Tag says not a sandbox. Lede says it is a sandbox. My edit said it is not a sandbox. Perhaps another editor can clarify that contradiction.--Dthomsen8 (talk) 19:50, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Dthomsen8, the page is essentially a template for sandboxes users going through the help tutorial create. That's what's stated in the box at the top. You can see an example of it being invoked if you visit Help:Introduction to editing with Wiki Markup/6. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:13, 8 August 2020 (UTC)