Template talk:Woman's club movement

expand or contract?

Hi, User:Megalibrarygirl and others. This template has served a good purpose but maybe now should be revised. Please note recent refocus and move of List of women's club buildings to List of women's clubs, and then much expansion there to make it a very big list article. Including reorganization there to have a national section like this template does, and adding more international clubs. It covers more than this template does now, and this template needs to be updated at least. Going the other way, this template has a few items still not yet included in the big list-article, which I will try to add there.

Given how big the complete list-article is, I am not sure this template should mirror it. Perhaps this template could cover the various topics it does, e.g. topic of related publications (which should be expanded by creation of some new articles by the way, IMHO), but not itemize all the individual local women's clubs? --Doncram (talk) 01:33, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

@Doncram: as a librarian, I'm not a cataloger and I always feel frustrated by organizing information. (I'm a researcher, not a cataloger is how I look at it.) So I'm not sure if I'll bring a good point of view when trying to figure out how to organize a template. I created it to link the clubs together, so that's what my thinking was. However, I'm always willing to bow down to other organizers and look at what they say about creating hierarchies for information.Ser Amantio di Nicolao may have a good insight into how to organize things. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 01:58, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi, Megalibrarygirl, i sympathize/identify with you; i always thought I would leave categorizing to other editors, was not much interested myself. But in fact I have felt i had to be involved at times. There is good essay wp:CLT about relationships of categories, list-articles, navigation templates. An extreme example of a way-too-big template was covered at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2017 January 17#Template:List of United States Post Offices. In the discussion there i pointed to some good advice about navigation templates at wp:CLT that may be relevant here:

Navigation templates are particularly useful for a small, well-defined group of articles; templates with a large numbers of links are not forbidden, but can appear overly busy and be hard to read and use. Good templates generally follow some of these guidelines:

1. All articles within a template relate to a single, coherent subject.
2. The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article.
3. The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent.
4. There should be a Wikipedia article on the subject of the template.
5. If not for the navigation template, an editor would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See also sections of the articles.

If the collection of articles does not meet these tests, that indicates that the articles are loosely related, and a list or category may be more appropriate.

Do not rely solely on navboxes for links to articles highly relevant to a particular article. Navboxes are not displayed on the mobile website for Wikipedia which accounts for approximately 30% of readers.

Hmm, maybe having multiple U.S. state or regional templates would make sense, and changing this one to index the state/regional templates and to cover the U.S. national-level issues and cover the international ones (unless or until someone wanted to split off world-wide vs. U.S. templates). A state or regional level for New Mexico or the Southwest would allow readers to navigate from, say, Silver City Woman's Club to Alamogordo Woman's Club in the same state, but not be overwhelming. A reader is not likely to want to navigate from a local club in New Mexico to one in Florida. Each individual club page could have the international/national level template and a state or regional level template. Pinging User:WomenArtistUpdates too. Maybe splitting and expanding this way could be a plan, to be implemented by whoever would like to proceed with it, whenever?

By the way I have begun appreciating Official Register and Directory of Women's Clubs in America, 1922 (Vol XXIV, the 24th annual edition), published by Helen M. Winslow, which is organized by International vs. U.S. National level stuff then by regions in the U.S. --Doncram (talk) 02:41, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Doncram I like the idea of regional levels and then a state level. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 20:19, 23 August 2019 (UTC)