Template talk:Nanomaterials

This is the navbox for articles related to Nanomaterials. For a complete list of nanotech navboxes, see User:Antony-22/Navboxes. Antony-22 (talk) 07:31, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Should be a navbar not a sidebar

Navigation sidebars make no sense.

• Hardly anyone surfs wikipedia by broad topic.
• People who are interested in a broad topic like nanotechnology should read the Nanotechnology article, which will have links to the relevant articles in an organized way.
• Sidebars use precious space that should be used for figures about the article itself.
• Each article usually belongs to half a dozen broad topics. Even Jesus belongs to the topic "Islam". Can't have a sidebar for each broad topic; so there should be none.
• Creating, inserting, and updating sidebars/navbars wastes valuable editor time, which should be better used for creating new articles or editing the contents of old ones.

So, PLEASE, turn this sidebar into a bottom-of-article navbar. Or, better yet, just scrap it.
Sincerely, and all the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 17:42, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Use of a sidebar is within policy. See WP:SIDEBAR. Nanotechnology is such a diverse topic that separate sidebars for the major subtopics are justified and shouldn't be hidden at the bottom of the article. What is your justification that "hardly anyone surfs wikipedia by broad topic"? Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 00:40, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

• The WP:SIDEBAR guideline is irrelevant: it was written by editors who create sidebars and think that they are a good idea. It does not give any evidence or argument supporting this latter claim.
  Again, people who are interested in the broad topic "nanotechnology" should read the Nanotechnology article and follow links from there. All browsers suport tabs, so the reader can keep that article in one tab and return to it if and when he wants to read another article on that topic. Even those readers will not want to read all the articles "owned" by the nanotechnlogy project or only those articles. For those readers, a "nanotechnology" sidebar will have very limited usefulness, not worth the valuable space that it consumes (including the space of a distracting picture that is not relevant to the article).
  But the vast majority of readers come to wikipedia to answer specific questions, such as "what is a nanotube" or "how does one make copper nanoparticles". For those users, the sidebar is totally useless.
  --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 07:44, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

An editing guideline is hardly irrelevant just because you disagree with it. If you desire to reduce the number of sidebars in general, the place to start a discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates.

Sidebars in particular are helpful in giving readers a quick overview of the prominent topics if they do not want to pick through the entire article at that particular time. Different people interact with the article in different ways at different times, and we should serve all reasonable use cases rather than getting into an argument to select just one to privilege. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 09:08, 30 May 2019 (UTC)