Template talk:New International Encyclopedia

Opening description

New International Encyclopedia is an article in Wikipedia that describes the wherefores and whatnots of the publication. Superslum 10:38, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Error in the NIE template

The following mistake results in a widely propagated inaccuracy to an out-of-copyright citation at Wikipedia.If it can be fixed, the correction will propagate widely, and result in improved information accuracy in the encyclopedia.

The template:

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

should reflect the fact that the editors of this first edition were: Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby (see Template:New_International_Encyclopedia).

Instead, it presents the the third editor as "F. Moore" (presenting the middle name, omitting the surname).

Please, indicate here how this might be fixed (or, if easily done, execute the correction yourselves)? Cheers. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 16:18, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I have fixed it see the edit history of the template for details. -- PBS (talk) 19:17, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

It has not been fixed. This error still appears on more than a thousand pages. @Trappist the monk:, look at the error, it appears at the top of the broken template you restored. Viriditas (talk) 21:24, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

OP says that the template should reflect the fact that the editors of this first edition were: Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby. The version of the template that you don't like (Special:Permalink/1114704794) has:

Gilman, D. C. ← Daniel Coit Gilman

Peck, H. T. ← Harry Thurston Peck

Colby, F. M. ← Frank Moore Colby

Those names agree with the 1905 title page at Wikisource.

I don't see anything in error here. What am I missing?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:44, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

You're correct! The error only appears when you revert to your version. I will self-revert and show you. The error also appears at the top of the template. Are you ready? Viriditas (talk) 21:54, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Now, do you see it above and in the template? "{{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)" Viriditas (talk) 21:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

For the avoidance of further confusion, I have nowiki'd the call to {{cite encyclopedia}} in your post because empty citation is not at issue.

You are complaining about something other than the editor name-list which is OP's topic? Are you complaining that the use of {{NIE}} without parameters produces an error message: {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)? If you are, the error message is intentional. The missing title is the title of the article or entry in the NIE from which an en.wiki editor took text and to which attribution is appropriate. Since this 3 July 2012 edit by Editor PBS, this template has emitted some sort of an error message when an {{NIE}} template is missing the NIE article title.

Note that the template's documentation has this:

One of |title= or |wstitle= is required. Articles using this template without either parameter are placed in Category:Cite NIE template missing title parameter.

If you believe that that is inadequate, please improve it.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

This error was introduced into thousands of transcluded instances. How am I supposed to improve upon your breaking of the template? Since you are insisting on this change, I suggest you spend the next three months fixing all the errors in the articles you introduced. If you believe that that is inadequate, then I will restore the old template version without the error. To recap, you broke the template in thousands of pages. You call my observation of this problem "complaining" and refuse to fix the error you've introduced. Furthermore, these glaring errors have been in thousands of articles for more than six years without you doing anything about it. Did I summarize the problem correctly? Viriditas (talk) 22:48, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

This error was introduced into thousands of transcluded instances. Evidence to support that claim? As I write this, this template is transcluded into 1284 articles. A more-or-less random sampling of 50 articles in Category:Cite NIE template missing title parameter showed none that have more than one instance of the template so thousands of transcluded instances seems a bit of a stretch.

What I was attempting, and apparently failed to accomplish, was to suggest that you might improve the template's documentation if you believe it to be inadequate. Documentation can almost always be improved.

I think that your summary is flawed:

• you broke the template in thousands of pages – the current version of the template is working as it was intended to work. It works more-or-less the same way that it did before I updated it with this edit. Before my edit, the thousands of pages that you claim I broke, were already 'broken' such that when missing an NIE article or entry title, those 'broken' templates displayed ^{article name needed}. There are technical reasons for replacing the 'article name needed' message with the current 'missing title' message. I can explain that if you want.
• You call my observation of this problem "complaining" and refuse to fix the error you've introduced. Yes, I think that you are complaining. Were there something wrong with the template, I would fix it. But, I don't consider a required-parameter-is-missing error message to be an error that [I've] introduced.
• Furthermore, these glaring errors have been in thousands of articles for more than six years without you doing anything about it. Here's that thousands of articles claim again. Category:Cite NIE template missing title parameter currently has 627 articles. According to the archived snapshots of the category page at archive.org, the number of articles in the category has slowly been declining (a good thing) – I didn't find any article count above 1000. And you're right, I haven't done anything about that.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:40, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

The more important issue here for me is that you (and many others) think it’s perfectly acceptable to do this to templates and leave it for others to fix. This is the reason I’ve mostly stopped using citation templates, because the same erroneous philosophy was at work. Why do you think or believe it is acceptable to have encyclopedia articles with broken templates like this? I’m really curious how your mind works and how you could possibly justify this lapse in reason? Please enlighten me. Viriditas (talk) 01:15, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

On second thought, fuck it. I have no interest in understanding the way your thought process works or doesn’t work. I will simply remove this template wherever I find it from here on out. Problem solved. Viriditas (talk) 01:24, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

I will simply remove this template wherever I find it from here on out. Then you would be a vandal.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:44, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

No, I would not, and your claim is absurd and laughable to the very core. You cannot have it both ways. You are forcing our readers, the majority of whom are not editors, to view broken templates in our articles, templates that were once simple and easy to use, that have unnecessarily been made complex and unwieldy by template editors like yourself, editors so remotely removed from our basic readership that you’ve completely forgotten the purpose of this site. There is no policy mandating the use of these templates anywhere, and I am free to remove them as I see fit and replace them with text. I hope I cleared up your misconception for you. Again, I repeat, I will remove the template you broke whenever I see it. Your editorial intransigence, your refusal to fix templates that you broke, and your creation of convoluted, complex templates that defeat the purpose of usability, readability, and user interface design best practices are all the justification I need. You have become anti-encyclopedist in your obsessive compulsive need to force broken templates on everyone else. That is why I will remove them whenever I see them and refuse to ever use them again. Let me know if you have any questions and I would be happy to explain it in more detail for you. Viriditas (talk) 22:11, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

At the moment I am currently busy in real life and have little time for Wikipedia. Although I prefer the previous wording, I am not going to reinstate it at the moment as the warning is basically the same. @User:Trappist the monk What are your "technical reasons for replacing" as the new red warning message is more confusing than the old one given that |wstitle= is the desired parameter not |title=?

User:Viriditas if the NIE title is not included then what in effect Wikipedia is saying to the reader is that somewhere in the 20 volumes there is text in the NIE used in the Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia is not going to tell you where—so have fun tracking it down.

In the good old days many EB1911 articles were presented without article names (now none of them are), and we who tracked down the EB1911 articles found quite a few copyright problems because naughty editors had coped text from copyrighted sources and claimed it was from the EB1911. For this reason apart from ease of use for readers, editors need to be able to check that the source supports the text in the article for copyright reasons. Therefore I do not agree with you User:Viriditas when you state that "I will remove the template you broke whenever I see it", because the template is not broken it is long citation to the reference that is broken and the template helps to flag that. Replacing the template will not fix the references and it will make it harder for editors (who care about such issues), to find and fix such references. -- PBS (talk) 14:11, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

The technical reason is that this string of characters is not a valid title:

<sup><span style="color:red">article name needed</span></sup>

{{cite encyclopedia}} cannot discriminate between valid and invalid titles so invalid titles corrupt the metadata.

The best place to state that |wstitle= is preferred over |title= is in the {{NIE}} and {{cite NIE}} documentation. Interestingly, the preference is reversed in {{cite NIE}} where |title= is preferred when both |title= and |wstitle= are set.

In the same place that the documentation for these templates says this:

Articles using this template without either parameter are placed in Category:Cite NIE template missing title parameter

it might be a good idea to note the error message that {{cite encyclopedia}} produces when both |title= and |wstitle= are omitted or empty:

This template is a wrapper template around {{cite encyclopedia}}. When |title= and |wstitle= are omitted or empty, {{cite encyclopedia}} emits this error message:

{{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

This is a common flaw with any template that wraps another. {{NIE}} and {{cite NIE}} could short-cut the error messaging process and render nothing but an error message when both of |title= and |wstitle= are omitted or empty:

{{cite NIE}}: One of |title= or |wstitle= required or some such...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:59, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Noting simply that I've also noticed the overall problem via its invocation at Alfred Moore (I will probably delete the template's usage there). I have a general interest in helping but the issue appears to be fairly technical. MinnesotanUser (talk) 04:28, 10 November 2022 (UTC)