Template talk:WikiProject Banksia

The new standard seems to be NA-Class Foo articles instead of Non-article Foo pages, this template should be updated. TRS-80 (talk) 16:38, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Two edits undone

I have just undone two edits for the following reasons:

1. Unless a blank default is given the result of the if will always be positive.
2. The template automatically handles blank importance as unknown importance so there is no need to do that.

Perhaps if you tell me what is not working correctly I can try to fix it for you. Martin 08:22, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

The template is not automatically handling blank importance as unknown importance. Your revert of my second edit (my first edit was in error) has repopulated Category:-importance Australia articles and Category:-importance plant articles. My second edit moved these articles to Category:Unknown-importance Australia articles and Category:Unknown-importance plant articles. --Pascal666 (talk) 04:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

It appears the problem was caused by this edit to Template:WPBannerMeta/importancescale by User:Happy-melon. However, even without that edit I don't see where blank importance would have been treated as Unknown importance, it would simply have been ignored. --Pascal666 (talk) 04:35, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed. Sorry about that. The reason is that a couple of months ago we switched to using an importance mask on a separate page: Template:WPBannerMeta/importance. If you look, it is "unknown" by default. The reason this one failed is that I coded it manually because this banner works a bit differently to the standard taskforce setup of most banners. Martin 06:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually the edit you quoted did not affect unknown importance in any way. That was just to let it accept "bottom-importance" which a few projects use! Martin 06:08, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Correct, it did not affect unknown importance, what it did affect was every importance other than Top, High, Mid, Low, NA, and Unknown. In the past if you passed something other than those to the template it would do nothing. Now if you pass it something else the #default kicks in and categories pages in places like Category:-importance Australia articles and Category:Loow-importance Australia articles when passed nothing or a typo for example. Really that template needs to be modified so that if it is passed a recognized importance it puts the article there, if it is passed something else it should put the article in Category:Pages that use a WPBannerMeta template incorrectly or similar so the typos can be found and fixed. --Pascal666 (talk) 08:27, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

There is no problem with the template. The core passes a masked importance to the importancescale, and any unrecognised ones will result in "Unknown". By the way, I think I've found a better way to deal with this template but it's not working correctly yet but I will continue to work on it. Martin 10:13, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

That works fine if Template:WPBannerMeta/importancescale were always called via Template:WPBannerMeta/core, but when templates like this one call it directly with an invalid importance you end up with miscategorizations. Templates should never make assumptions about how they are called, but instead always do error checking on parameters so problems can be found. --Pascal666 (talk) 11:27, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

(undent)I've fixed the banner - a silly mistake on my part. It should all be working fine now. By the way, I notice that most of the Banksia articles are also tagged with the Australia banner as well, so I was wondering if this banner needs to add the Australia categories as well? Martin 16:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It can't; there's a clash. The Australia banner works top down i.e. it supports adding subprojects e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Western Australia. This template works bottom up i.e. it supports adding superproject e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Plants. We need the ability to add, e.g., Western Australian banksias to WP:WA, and the only way to do that is to add a WP:AUS banner with WA=yes. That would mean adding a WA argument to this template. And then we'd need arguments for every other state. It all gets too messy. I am convinced that the problem is the top down implementation of the AUS banner, for reasons that I have argued here, but there seems to be too much inertia on this point. Hesperian 22:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I was only talking about the main "Australia articles" categories. At the moment, both banners are categorising for both quality and importance. By the way, top-down is the more usual way and seems more logical to me. Why do you prefer bottom-up? Martin 22:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, what's the use of that? We would still have to add the Australia banner in order to get the state projects.

Why? As I said, "for reasons that I have argued here". In brief:

1. The main purpose of the (visible part of the) banner is to advertise the project. The banner should therefore be as specific as possible, because people who visit an article like Banksia epica are far more likely to respond to an advertisement for WP:BANKSIA than the more general WP:PLANTS or WP:AUS.
2. Some people argue that folding many projects into a single banner reduces banner clutter, but this is not true. If we folded {{WP Banksia}} into {{WP Australia}} then we could dump {{WP Banksia}}, and just add "Banksia=yes" to {{WP Australia}}. But then we'd have to go around putting {{WikiProject Plants}} tags on all our articles. On the other hand, if we make WP:PLANTS the parent, and fold {{WP Banksia}} into {{WikiProject Plants}}, then we still need all those {{WP Australia}} tags. There's no top-down solution here. The only way to reduce tag clutter in this situation is to adopt a bottom-up approach and always tag with the most specific banner(s). Which is impossible in this case because WP:AUS doesn't play by those rules.
3. Have a look at the {{WP Australia}} code. It is an unreadable, unmaintainable mess, because it is trying to do way too many things at once.

Hesperian 23:28, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you are still misunderstanding my point so I will try once more. I am not saying that you can manage with just one banner. I am pointing at that both Template:WP Banksia and Template:WikiProject Australia categorise articles into appropriate subcategories of Category:Australia articles by quality and Category:Australia articles by importance. This is probably not a good idea because

1. To set importance for Australia properly, you have to add two parameters. importance in Template:WikiProject Australia and aus-importance in Template:WP Banksia. This takes more time.
2. If one was not careful to set these parameters equal, you could be categorising into two different quality and importance categories, which would not be appropriate.

Therefore I was suggesting that you let the Australia banner handle the Australian categories and remove this from the Banksia template.

In my opinion the "logical" way to do this would be the following.

1. WPBanksia is a subproject of WPPlants, and uses the Plants banner.
2. The Plants and Australia banners are added to every article.

This makes everything consistent with the top-down approach. (I appeciate your point about having a specific banner though.) Martin 10:17, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that the WP Australia stuff should be removed from this template. No, I don't agree with substituting the WikiProject Plants banner for this banner. Hesperian 11:13, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Quality scale

I just undid an edit to the template which, as well as breaking something else, introduced the full quality scale (e.g. Template-Class, Disambig-Class, etc. etc.) to Banksia articles. I thought I would check whether or not that was desirable. There might be something in it, as Plants is using the full scale. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:12, 21 April 2009 (UTC)