User talk:Mathglot/sandbox/Templates/Interpolated comment

Feedback, bug reports, feature requests

Your feedback and other comments about improving this template are welcome. Mathglot (talk) 02:26, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Seems good. Thanks. —Alalch E. 10:59, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for creating this; it's useful for cleanup. I would think it wise add something to the docs page that reminds users that this template should not be used to interpolate their own comments into anothers' comments, consistent with WP:TPO. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 13:06, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Red-tailed hawk, Ooh, that's a really good point. Any suggestions for wording? Or just feel free to jump in and add what seems best to you. Mathglot (talk) 20:14, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

I've thrown some wording in there. WP:INTERPOLATE provides some clear guidance, so I just quoted from it. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 20:21, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Interpolated threads

In the scenario:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth

The boxed material was written by a different user and placed in the middle of a prior comment by User:A. Lincoln, which continues after the box.

You mean, 87 years. /Troll/

The text below is a continuation of the same comment by the OP which began above the box.

Thanks, that helps. BTW, I left this reply after {{Interpolated comment}} was added to your comment. /A. Emis/

a new nation, conceived in liberty. /A. Lincoln/

... the reply to the troll should not also be set off using this template – I don't think that the following is a good result:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth

The boxed material was written by a different user and placed in the middle of a prior comment by User:A. Lincoln, which continues after the box.

You mean, 87 years. /Troll/

The text below is a continuation of the same comment by the OP which began above the box.

The boxed material was written by a different user and placed in the middle of a prior comment by User:A. Lincoln, which continues after the box.

Thanks, that helps. BTW, I left this reply after {{Interpolated comment}} was added to your comment. Edit: Coming here again a bit later, I see that the same template was also applied to my comment. /A. Emis/

The text below is a continuation of the same comment by the OP which began above the box.

a new nation, conceived in liberty. /A. Lincoln/

In the scenario:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth

You mean, 87 years. /Troll/

Thanks, that helps. BTW, I left this reply before {{Interpolated comment}} was used. /A. Emis/

a new nation, conceived in liberty. /A. Lincoln/

... I'm not sure if this template should be used on either interpolating comment individually. However, this could be good:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth

The boxed material was written by a different user and placed in the middle of a prior comment by User:A. Lincoln, which continues after the box

You mean, 87 years. /Troll/

Thanks, that helps. BTW, I left this reply before {{Interpolated comment}} was used. Edit: Coming here again a bit later, I see that this template was applied to our entire interpolated thread. /A. Emis/

The text below is a continuation of the same comment by the OP which began above the box.

a new nation, conceived in liberty. /A. Lincoln/

—Alalch E. 12:30, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

In general, I do think that the troll comment should simply be moved below the comment being responded to (or deleted if vandalism), but I do see a scenario where this might be useful. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 13:36, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

It's just a "Troll" comment because I recycled an example from the documentation, but let's imagine that it not a troll comment, but an okay comment, that is placed next to the relevant portion of the interrupted comment context-wise, and it could be best not to refactor the discussion by moving comments, due to later comments etc. —Alalch E. 13:42, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Sure. I agree that the due to later comments etc. part is the key difference. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 13:52, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for these comments. Sorry I dropped the ball a bit on this, I've now subscribed to both threads, so will be notified. This came up again for me thanks to this thread on my Talk page. Comments still encouraged, and I'll try to be better about responding here in the future. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

When did this get moved into a sandbox draft? — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 02:09, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Red-tailed hawk, two weeks ago, as a result of this Tfd. There is a very active group culling unused templates, and this got caught up with the rest of them. I couldn't really ping you or anyone, because that would be canvassing, and rather than lose the template entirely, I just userfied it, thus ending the Tfd. I could've fought it, and have done so in the past with other little-used templates, but there have been quite a few that landed at Tfd, and I don't always have the energy, so I just moved it. I do think it should be moved back to Template space eventually, and with a few more uses, I'm sure it can be. In the meantime, there are various possibilities for improvement under discussion at the thread Alalch E. started on my Talk page, here (which really should be here on the template talk page, and not there). Mathglot (talk) 10:01, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Improvement brainstorming

Moved from User talk:Mathglot § User:Mathglot/sandbox/Templates/Interpolated comment

I used this template in Talk:Elves in Middle-earth#Diagram errors. Expectedly, the sufferer of interpolation replied to interpolating content by self-interpolating. The result is inconsistent. But its better than nothing. But I am not sure. I had some thoughts about this at User talk:Mathglot/sandbox/Templates/Interpolated comment#Interpolated threads. I think that the "interpolated thread" approach could be a solution. The reply button doesn't work. I don't think that it can even be made to work. That seems like a bit of a problem. I don't know how to "make" editors reply inside the box in order to form interpolated threads. Have you maybe also thought about this? I'm not very optimistic, but I see some promise. Sincerely —Alalch E. 19:19, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

Alalch E., thank you very much for this. First of all: I'm glad you even found it in my userspace, how did you? There is a very active Template hunting group, that nominates templates that are not in use for deletion, and while I think their work is needed because a lot of old templates stay around forever, it takes a while for a new template to gain traction, and sometimes they get caught up in the hunt. Based on your usage, I can probably move it back out of my user space to Template space again, otherwise no one will find it. I'm surprised and pleased you did.

With respect to the issue at hand: I had a glance at it, and I'll look some more and ponder it, but I'm starting to have some ideas already, which I won't be able to work on right away. One is to have an additional parameter (or maybe it could be done without it) that would assign a different background color for a second interpolated user (even if's the original user, self-interpolating. The color would very light pastel, in order not to interfere with reading the text, but just sufficient to look different from other users.) This should probably be limited to two colors for two users, as the mind can only parse nesting up to a certain limit. (There are actually linguistic studies about this with respect to embedded syntactical structures, such as, "Ann said, 'Ron said, "Bob said, 'I'm leaving now', but he's hard of hearing, so maybe he didn't",' didn't he?" where you just get lost in the parsing stack, even though it is grammatical. And I wouldn't swear I got my example right, either, because I felt lost and in need of a third kind of quotation marks.)

Anyway... I think colors might help for two users, but I don't think we should go further than that, because it would become too difficult to understand, even assuming someone could place the template correctly, just as I wasn't sure about my example just above. I'd have to think how that would work.

Another thought I had, was to try to avoid the situation in the first place, of the original OP (User1) replying to the interpolated comment by User2 with another interpolated comment, to reduce the likelihood that we would even need colors or anything else to deal with a second level of nesting. What if we reword the below-the-box note (The text below is a continuation...) to discourage users (including User1) from doing another interpolation? Something on the order of this:

All replies go at the end of a user comment, not here per WP:THREAD. The text below is a continuation of the comment by the OP which began above the box.

Seems like that ought to stifle any initial urge to reply there; what do you think?

Another idea I had, would be to repeat the OP sig after each broken chunk of OP text. This would involve passing the OP sig as a new, optional param (skipping the param and finding it might be possible in Lua, if this template were converted to a module), and repeating it at the end of each chunk of the OP's comment. So in effect, the OP would have multiple, identical sigs on their post: the original one, all the way at the end, and one additional copy just before each interpolation box. If there *were* a second level of embedded reply (god, let's try and avoid that!) then having duplicate sigs seems like the only way for a human to be able to make sense of any of it, maybe with the addition of a second color box.

Another idea I had is to change the invocation style, so instead of the current:

{{interpolated comment|indent=number|OP=username|1=

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. /User2 sig/

}}

we would have this instead:

{{interpolated comment begin|indent=number|iuser=User1|ts=...}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. /User2 sig/

{{interpolated comment end}}

where param |iuser= is the new name for param 'OP', and |ts= is the timestamp copied from their original post. (Called 'iuser' to bring to mind "interrupted user", as it is the userid who wrote the part above this template, not the userid of the interpolated comment which follows, which, presumably, has already been signed by the interpolator.) This begin-end style is used in many templates, and is probably conceptually easier for the template user to understand and use, and easier for wikicode readers also, especially in the case of a long post, where finding {{interpolated comment end}} in the code somewhere, even if unfamiliar, can easily be looked up, whereas finding a stray, uncommented '}}' is both mysterious, and error-prone.

Besides being easier to place and to understand, this begin-end style could now make the case of a second level of nesting doable (which we will try to prevent the need for, albeit not always successfully, perhaps), and hopefully comprehensible, at least by those of us hard-core and determined enough to makes sense out of such a labyrinthine mess and rationalize it to the extent possible, which is probably a small group including you, me, Red-tailed hawk, and a handful of other users I can think of. Because with this approach, the third-party interpolation (or self-interp, as at Elves, which amounts to the same thing), could now have this:

{{interpolated comment begin|indent=number|iuser=User2|ts=...|level=2}}

Curabitur pretium tincidunt lacus. Nulla gravida orci a odio. Nullam varius, turpis et commodo pharetra, est eros bibendum elit, nec luctus magna felis sollicitudin mauris. Integer in mauris eu nibh euismod gravida. /User3 sig/

{{interpolated comment end}}

where |level= is a new param that would trigger background color or whatever other styling we would want to keep everything comprehensible. An example would help here, as maybe even this description seems mysterious, and I will have to work up an example of a double-interpolation (or self-interp) to show what I mean, but I won't be able to get to that right away, either, so hopefully you'll be able to follow the breadcrumbs.

These are my initial thoughts about this; I'm sure I'll have more as we go along. Alalch E., I want to thank you for taking the time to write and offer your thoughts about this. I think this could lead to a more robust template, that will help even more in situations like this. And then we can have a little block party for the hardcore group, with plenty of tesseract party favors, and punch served in Klein's bottles (oops, how do I drink out of this thing?). Mathglot (talk) 21:34, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

IIRC, I found it while it was in template space by searching for "template:interpolated ..." to see if such a template exists. Later (recently) I looked for it and noticed that you've moved it to userspace; I was able to guess what the reason was. Thanks for creating it. And thanks for laying out all these interesting and worthwhile options. You are right on the talk subpage that would have been a better place for this discussion. If you'd like to simply cut-and-paste this section there, that would be fine. Sorry that this reply is probably a bit of a letdown—I have been dealing with some things and haven't been on the wiki for the past ten days. I'll get back to you on this when I'm back in the correct headspace. So far I can say that trying to ... avoid the situation in the first place, of the original OP (User1) replying to the interpolated comment by User2 with another interpolated comment is unlikely to work and may not be needed. I think. Once interpolation sets in, and the discussion is not refactored by someone to de-interpolate content (which I believe is appropriate under the talk page guideline, but is generally impractical), it may not even be better for the replies to individual interpolated items to not be adjacent to them. —Alalch E. 17:08, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Note: Discussion moved here from my UTP. Mathglot (talk) 18:13, 5 October 2024 (UTC)