Template talk:WikiProject Carnivorous plants

Metabanner

Okay, that revert was in order, but mybe I can alleviate some of your concerns? The plants importance rating can easily be displayed in the main section without having to expand a collapsed section. The only other required change was the mild change of category names from X-class carnivorous plant articles to X-Class carnivorous plant articles. I was in the process of doing this, but stopped now. Apart from that you have all the advantages of standardising, the main one being that it will be kept up to date without anyone needing to worry about it, no matter what changes are made to the software and other templates. Thoughts? Martin 16:44, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I can't offer a full reply right now for time constraints (didn't want it to seem like I reverted and ran!), just letting you know I'll be back later to explain. I'd also like to read more about Metabanner before implementation on this project. On the categories, yeah, I dislike the capitalization of "Class" - seemed odd since I first started mucking about with these templates - but I changed WP:PLANTS banner and categories after discussion with another editor and was eventually going to get around to this project's categorization as well. It turned out to be a very delicate move for the WP:PLANTS categories - someone else had tried to do it and left various pieces out of order or missing completely and it took considerable effort to sort out. Anyway, I'll be back to explain further! Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 16:51, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay, let's talk later. In the meantime, a few general points about the banner.

• It seems strange and unusual to me, to be categorising by importance on the plants scale, but not categorising by quality. (As I sure you know, the usual practice is that the quality classes are the same, and the importance classes can be different.)
• It is also somewhat unusual for a banner to be categorising into a parent project's categories. As you are a sub-project of WP:Plants, it seems to me that WikiProject Carnivorous Plants would be better off using the {{tl:Plants}} template, and that template adapted to make it clear that the article comes under your project (like a taskforce, but it wouldn't need to be called such). If this happened, the templates would not need to be changed on the pages, as the relevant parameters could just be passed to the plants template.
• I recognise that the collapsed section was pointless because the "More information" line took up as much space as the importance rating would have!
• I have recently converted Template:WP Banksia and it seems to be working well. I don't generally make changes without making sure that the job is done properly and everything works properly!

Later, Martin 17:15, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Martin. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. I admit I should keep a better eye on what's going on up above our little projects here. I'll go point by point as that seems easiest:

• In the current template, all WP:CPS articles assessed for quality are automatically categorized into the corresponding WP:PLANTS quality categories. Perhaps you just missed that? The intent was to have the quality categories the same without any extra input from the assessor.
• Well, we've had this discussion before (the partial discussion I could find was here at an early template union proposal for the Tree of Life project). The general agreement among editors was that subprojects should be the face of the articles they've built, since it stands in for advertising the project and provides the right contact info if anyone needs to ask questions. But it's hard to imagine how {{WikiProject Plants}} could be modified without a mockup - you mean something like a switch so that if someone would write {{WikiProject Plants|CP=yes|...}} or something like that it would change the image, assessment categories, etc.?
• I haven't taken a long hard look at the changes that were made, but was every parameter we used still in tact? If we wanted to add more, like needs-image=yes, attention=yes, or needs-taxobox=yes, could we? And if we did, do we have the option of not having them under the more info line? I understand the reason for the more information line - keeping size down - but there are some things you'd like to be visible, like if something needs attention from an editor.

I appreciate your commitment to doing a thorough job of it all. I suppose this is mostly a reaction to a learning curve here. In the template's current state, I know how to manage it. But if I want to manage it after the metabanner is in place, I'll need to do some more reading. Supposedly this was the point to make it all uniform and easily manageable, but I suspect you might bump into similar reactions from other projects. I'm not sure how far along the conversion is, but it might be prudent to let each project know so that those that manage that project's templates can be informed before changes take place. A centralized discussion might help. Just a suggestion.

Anyway, after a bit of reading, I don't suppose I have any objection to the metabanner. One little blip I noticed was the assessment notice for WP:PLANTS importance. When absent, the image is fine, but when present can it be like the other parameters and show Low, Mid, etc.? And of course, I'm only one voice from the project. We're not extremely active at the moment, but there are one or two other editors around here that might have an opinion. I'll let them know and see what they think. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 15:50, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi Ryan.

• Yes I did miss that! I guess I was looking at all the parameters that were passed, and as this one doesn't have a separate parameter I didn't notice it. The converted banner did not implement these categories, but of course it's easy to do.
• The most standard way would reflect that carnivorous plants are a subproject of plants. So the banner would say "This article comes under WP:Plants." and then underneath it would say "This article comes under Carnivorous plants." As a random example, if you look at Talk:Fearless (1993 film), you've got the Australia banner and then underneath you have the Australian cinema subproject. I could certainly make a mockup of the plants banner if you think it would be well received. I could put it at Template:WikiProject Plants 2 and put it on a few pages as examples.
• I believe and hope that every parameter still worked, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. One of the main advantages of the meta-banner is that it is so easy to add extra options without any expert knowledge of templates, style sheets, div classes, etc. All notes can be collapsed or not collapsed, as required. I think the instructions at Template:WPBannerMeta are quite good.
• About the importance rating for plants, I think the options are:
  • As I did it.
  • By abusing the taskforce function. (These are designed for subprojects and taskforces, but there's no reason why it wouldn't work for parent projects.) This would give you the look of Talk:Fearless (1993 film) - still not showing the colours.
  • If you really think it's important, I can program a custom hook which will do it. The problem is that the wording can't be changed with the standard version.

About your final point, I have to say that in my experience 90% of projects don't even notice that the template is changed, and about 90% of the rest don't care! So I tend to convert first and then discuss later ;) Martin 18:19, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I just undid User:Ms2ger's conversion to the metabanner until this discussion is concluded. While we can advise WikiProjects to adopt the banner, it is not right to try to force it on them, especially if someone in the project has already expressed concern and reverted it once. That said, Ms2ger's edit did resolve the collapsing issue you had. Martin 20:55, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I didn't check the talk page, as it was rather straightforward to address the comment in Rkitko's edit summary. I hope we will be able to resolve this quickly—it would, IMO, be quite a waste of time to have to go through discussion about the deployment of this meta-template on every single talk page. —Ms2ger (talk) 11:54, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I can understand your frustration! It would be a pain to discuss this with every project. But you must also understand each project's position - some are small and maybe the templates are managed by only one person who may not have noticed the metabanner's development. When those people come to make the necessary alterations, the human reaction from the project might be to question it. I'll have to relearn how to manage this template with metabanner. I realize we don't own these pages, but we have to put up with them once you've made the changes and left! I suggested above the notification of each project of the metabanner so that projects can be informed before changes occur and maybe participate in a larger discussion. If not done, it seems like changes coming from above and being foisted upon unsuspecting projects without discussion. Change isn't bad; abrupt change with a learning curve may be. That being said, you've all probably worked hard on this template and I should recognize the considerable effort being taken here to standardize these. --Rkitko ^(talk) 15:50, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Well there has been no response for more than a week. So unless there are any further concerns I shall reimplement the metabanner tomorrow. Martin 16:36, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Apologies for the delay. It's finals week and I had a lot of grading to do, so I haven't been very active here. I'd actually appreciate the opportunity to take a crack at the metabanner myself - it'll help me learn the proper fields and how the template is designed. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 20:38, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure thing! By the way I'd recommend using the taskforce method of implementing the plants categorisation. That should be the cleanest way. I'll be on hand to help if necessary. Martin 08:14, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Martin. Well, I tried. Seems like we'd need to add |plants=yes or some similar parameter to all of our talk pages. It seems to be an added step of complexity that's unnecessary. Is there any way to get the metabanner to automatically recognize the two category systems for both projects? Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 04:30, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure, your second edit seemed the closest. Setting the tf1 trigger to a permanent "yes" will make sure they are always categorised under plants. But as the importance is handled by the taskforce code, the wording of TF_1_TEXT needs to change. It should just be "This page is within the scope of WP:Plants" or suchlike. Martin 08:54, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, I tried the tf1=yes and it didn't categorize into the xx-class plant article categories. Would it be possible to alter the text of the TF_1_TEXT parameter to something that would allow users to still see what the article is rated as under the other project without having to dig through the categories? Personally, I like the way it is, with a second ??? / Low / Mid / High / Top on the left under the one for the carnivorous plants project. Any ideas? Feel free to muck around with it if you need to. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 14:33, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be categorising fine now - can you check again? The current taskforce text is the default when TF_1_TEXT is not specified, and it says the plant-importance in brackets. I'll look into writing a hook which will display the importance on the left. Martin 19:20, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Ah, yep, works now! I wonder why it didn't work for me; I might have missed some important parameter. Anyway, thanks for that. I'd appreciate anything you can do on the custom hook. And I'll ask at WT:PLANTS if anyone has any strong feelings one way or the other about the metabanner so we might implement it there, too. Cheers, Rkitko ^(talk) 02:35, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

(outdenting) If I thought any other project would have a use for such a hook then I would get straight down to it. However it is unlikely as this is an unusual banner (because the "taskforce" is the parent project). I would recommend that the vice versa is implemented: i.e. that carnivorous be the "taskforce" of plants. I wouldn't contemplate that though, without converting that banner as well ... Martin 08:51, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Category for redirects?

Some other templates (e.g. Template:WikiProject Banksia which also uses Template:WPBannerMeta) place redirect talk pages (e.g. Talk:Birrna) in a redirect category (e.g. Category:Redirect-Class Banksia articles).

This template does NOT currently place redirect talk pages (e.g. Talk:Candollea calcarata) in Category:Redirect-Class carnivorous plant articles (which doesn't currently exist), although there is Category:Disambig-Class carnivorous plant articles.

Can this be changed so that Category:Redirect-Class carnivorous plant articles is populated? For info: There is a related CFD at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2014_April_27#Category:Drosera_by_synonymy. DexDor (talk) 05:21, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

this should fix it, but please create the category? Frietjes (talk) 22:00, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Apparently, this was a previous functionality of the wikiproject template, but it was deprecated and the category deleted. I'd check in the talk history and with the deleting admin before adding this back. VanIsaac_WS^cont 01:05, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I've created the category - for consistency with other projects, because there appears to be a wish to categorize these redirects (see CFD), there's been no discussion on this talk page about why redirects should not be categorized. The deleting admin is currently inactive. DexDor (talk) 05:02, 30 April 2014 (UTC)