User talk:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner

WikiProject banners

Reconstructed from User talk:Mike Dillon#WikiProject banners and User talk:Kirill Lokshin/Archive 2#Re: WikiProject banners

Ah, the interesting things one can discover when going through Recent changes. ;-)

While I hate to rain on your parade, there are a few issues that you might want to keep in mind:

• The templates used by the larger and more complicated (in structural terms) WikiProjects, such as {{WPMILHIST}} or {{WPBiography}}, have an arbitrary—and ever-changing—number of optional parameters (sometimes several dozen of them) that are unique to that particular project. (Most of these have to do with tagging subgroups of the project proper.) There doesn't seem to be any decent way of making these generic, given the current capabilities of MediaWiki; they would need to each be supported individually.
• Some templates also include non-standard conditional logic based on the values of various parameters—even standard ones.
• A common template for all projects would be included on 400,000+ (and growing!) pages; any edit to it would likely bring the server grinding to a halt. It would need to be edited fairly regularly, though—particularly if it supported per-project parameters.

(Suffice it to say that this idea has been proposed many times in the past; so far, nobody has figured out a way to implement it in a satisfactory manner.) Kirill Lokshin 05:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. I'm well aware that a generic WikiProject template will not work across the board, as I mentioned at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates#Generic WikiProject template; this attempt was more to see what can be accomplished with a common template. The target is WikiProjects without any active "techy" participants, to allow them to get the most bang for their buck in their templates by keeping the "esoteric" details out of their face. As you may have seen from the examples I created at User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox, my current template actually covers a lot of ground. You're right that it doesn't easily handle some of the more evolved WikiProjects.

As for the server load issue, I don't think this has been a problem for quite some time. These things are now handled in a job queue (see Special:Statistics for the current queue size).

Also, it may be possible to handle the custom sections like I did with the beer listings in {{Infobox Brewery}}. Feel free to let me know what you think on my talk page or comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates#Generic WikiProject template. Mike Dillon 05:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. The really ironic part is that if this thing gets any adoption at all, I probably won't be able to edit it because it will be protected ;) Mike Dillon 05:45, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The job queue helps, but editing extremely-high-usage templates still causes problems. This may not be an issue, though, if your design only gets used by the projects who don't need arbitrarily fancy features, as the largest ones tend to use them extensively.

The brewery design is usable in moderation, but it pushes the complexity out to the template call, which isn't a good thing; it also won't work if the code inside depends on the values of other parameters.

As a template for projects that can't or don't want to bother with designing their own, though, it may be workable (as they wouldn't be in a position to complain about not having access to all the more complex features). I'd suggest letting WP:COUNCIL know once you have something you think would be usable, and we can include it in the WikiProject guide as an alternative to the hand-coded version.

Good luck with getting things to work! :-) Kirill Lokshin 06:01, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to pepper you with messages, but if you can point me to any of the previous attempts, I'd appreciate it. I haven't gotten a huge response at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates (the project page does say it's inactive...). Mike Dillon 05:57, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

It's been discussed a number of times—most recently at the Council, actually—but I can't recall any extant examples of code offhand; I suspect that most of them reside in now-deleted sandboxes. My apologies for not being able to help out more. Kirill Lokshin 06:06, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

No need to apologize, you've been quite helpful and I'm glad to get some feedback. If this thing ever gets to the point where I want to make it better known, I'll post to the WP:COUNCIL talk page. In the meantime, I'm going to have a look at {{WPMILHIST}} and see what I can do with it. Mike Dillon 06:12, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

If you don't mind, please have a look at my sandbox. I made an attempt to show how something like the Military history task forces would be handled by a generic infobox. You're right that this pushes esoteric details up from the generic template to the project template, but on balance there is far less esoteric stuff since the esoteric parts of handling standard params are all wrapped up in one place.

My main fear with something like this is that a non-technical admin will try to edit it and add half a million entries to the job queue... I'm not familiar enough with the job queue to know if it's smart enough to only have one entry per page (to allow quick corrections to result in 1 * N queue entries instead of M * N, where "M" is the number of edits to the shared template and "N" is the number of transcluding articles).

Also, the main sticking points that I see still are related to category naming, not crazy params. Besides that, I probably need to deal with "peer-review" and "past-peer-rewiew" to cover most of the banners out there (if they don't want to customize the text too much). Mike Dillon 06:38, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Clever; but, as long as there's going to be a bunch of ugly code in the project template anyways, it becomes more convenient just to keep the hand-coded version to retain the full flexibility of the layout and function there. (Of course, that's just my opinion, based on my experience maintaining {{WPMILHIST}}; other projects may be willing to lose control over part of the template's code in exchange for not having to maintain it.)

(And, sadly, no, the job queue isn't very smart at all, and will purge the template once for every edit made to it; that's why edit wars on highly-used templates have sometimes resulted in the developers becoming quite annoyed.) Kirill Lokshin 13:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I had a look at JobQueue.php from MediaWiki 1.8.2 and I see what you mean. It is quite bare-bones. It also has no way to optimize finding refreshLinks jobs for the same page, since the only place that you could store a revision_id is effectively an opaque binary field that can't be indexed for any special cases. This thing could be improved, but it would probably require adding another table for job params and some indices; I'm not sure how consistent the MySQL infrastructure is for Wikimedia's server universe, but they would probably need to be InnoDB tables across the board to perform well. Maybe I should be spending my time writing a new job queue system instead of hacking templates ;) Mike Dillon 16:33, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject California

Reconstructed from User talk:Mike Dillon#Template:WikiProject California and User talk:BlankVerse#Re: Template:WikiProject California

Thank you for adding the extra parameters to the two California WikiProject templates. When you created the new categories, you probably saw that I had already been using the parameters when I assessed SoCal articles in anticipation of your changes. ^BlankVerse 14:18, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

You're welcome. I'm glad to help improve the state of the California Wikiprojects.

You might be interested in the generic WikiProject template I've been working on at User:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner. There are some demos at User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox (they have commented out params that can be demonstrated with "Show preview" to prevent my sandbox from ending up in categories). It's an attempt to cover the (presumed) 90% of the Wikiprojects that want the extra functionality in their templates without having to maintain it themselves. Mike Dillon 16:11, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

I took a look at User:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner. I like it, especially the infoboxneeded parameter.

I wonder if adding a logoneeded parameter would be a good idea. My reasoning is that searching for good Wikipedia-usable images can be a real PITA most of the time, but finding logos and city seals (as well as city flags) is usually quite simple and something most wikignomes and wiki noobies can do.

Another parameter that should be useful for most State WikiProjects would be a county parameter (e.g. county=Los Angeles County).

On the other hand, I'd like to see the attention parameter disappear, since the only times that I've seen it used is inappropriately.

BTW: I saw you corrected imageneeded to Imageneeded at Talk:Compton, California yesterday. Since the parameters are case-sensitive unless you do lots of extra coding, I think that they should all be lower-case unless they are proper nouns. I went and corrected all of the other instances where I'd typed lower-case imageneeded, but I should have edited the {{WikiProject Southern California}} template instead. ^BlankVerse 07:23, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right that the parameter should be "imageneeded"; I just made it "Imageneeded" because you asked me to copy it from {{TrainsWikiProject}} and that's what they were using. In the course of looking into making a generic WikiProject template, I saw at least "imageneeded", "Imageneeded", and "imagesneeded". That inconsistency is one of my main motivations for wanting to make a single meta-template to handle the standard parameters. I think it makes it confusing for people working in multiple WikiProjects. I ended up making it "imageneeded" and "imagedetails" in the generic template.

I'm not sure whether a "logoneeded" parameter would be that much better than just using "imagedetails" with "imageneeded". It would allow articles with logos needed to go into a separate category from other images, but not much else. But that might be enough to justify it. On the other hand, the category naming is one of the harder parts to "generify", so adding more categories adds more potential for naming issues.

On the issue of the "attention" param, one of the good/bad things about MediaWiki's template handling is that parameters need to be passed along from the calling template to the meta-template; you can't just have them pass through automatically. On the one hand, this decreases the utility of the meta-template itself because the templates that use it need to pass through all params explicitly (meaning that project templates can't magically support new params). On the other hand, this means that the individual projects can control whether or not they "support" a parameter by leaving it out.

Lastly, I'm not sure what the "county" parameter would be used for, but it probably is too specific to a particular type of WikiProject to go into the generic template. These are the sorts of things that could possibly be a show-stopper, but I was able to handle some fairly tricky project-specific stuff with {{User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox/Military History}}, albeit not to the project coordinator's full satisfaction ;)

It's starting to look like I should make this thing a little more official so that we can begin collecting these discussions in one place... Mike Dillon 17:19, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

On second thought, I don't think the county parameter is that useful. ^BlankVerse 17:26, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I was just going to ask another question: what do you think the relationship should be between Category:California articles needing images and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in California? I see now that you made it a child category yesterday. I guess that works. Mike Dillon 17:23, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

re:Category:California articles needing images and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in California? It's something that probably should be discussed at the WikiProject Council, because the issue probably involves more than just the California WikiProjects.

What I am planning to do for the Calif. WikiProjects is to add the imageneeded parameter to all the articles that are currently in the requested photos cat. Then I'll delete or modify the reqphoto template so that all of the articles are then removed from the requested photo categoy, so all of the articles are only in one category. ^BlankVerse 17:34, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

After sleeping on things, I think that the parameter should probably be imagesneeded since most articles really need more than one image.

Also, a couple of wish-list parameters, although I will admit that I want them mostly because of the rather braindamaged MediaWiki search engine:

reviewed: This would be for any article that has been peer-reviewed, a feature article candidate that didn't become a FA, and even demoted FAs.

disputed: This would be for any article that has a current dispute tag other than unreferenced.

I've tried looking for those types of articles by, for example, going through the peer-review archives, but it would be so much easier to be able to add the parameter as the articles are assessed so that they would all end up in their own categories. As I've said, they're just pie-in-the-sky wishes, and if adding them is too complicated, I'll understand. ^BlankVerse 13:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

As mentioned in the above discussion, "peer-review" and "past-peer-review" are on my TODO list if this thing ever takes off. The problem with them is that they generally link to a peer review subpage and the naming conventions across projects are not totally consistent. Many projects use a sub-subpage of their project page under "/Peer review". Some use a subpage called "/Peer review" of the reviewed page itself. That's why I haven't added it yet. If it has the broader use that you mentioned, it becomes even harder to know what to link to.

I think that the "disputed" parameter is a good idea and is probably more useful than "attention". It runs into the need for a consistent category structure like many of the other params, but I think that Category:Disputed ... articles should probably work for most cases (or should be acceptable to those projects that decide to use the template).

None of the things you've mentioned are particularly complicated, but in general I don't want to do too much to the template unless it looks like there is an interest from a good number of WikiProjects. We need to get a broader dicussion going if we really want to "standardize" this stuff. I'm planning on bringing it up with WP:COUNCIL some time soon, since there have been a couple recent discussions that off-handedly mentioned such a template in the last week. Mike Dillon 03:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

One other thing that I've seen in a number of the WikiProject banner templates is a link to a subpage for assessment comments. That too is not standardized, and I think I've seen both /assessments and /comments. My personal opinion is that if most of the WikiProjects start doing that, it may actually better to create a new namespace (assessments?) for those pages.

Your template is even more complicated than I thought it was. I tried to 'sneak' in the parameters that I wanted into the existing template (my sandbox version is here), but I messed up somewhere. You can see where I actually tested my rewrite, plus looked at your banner and a subst: version of your banner, and the original SoCal template on this page: User:BlankVerse/Sandbox3. Boy, if you use ALL the parameters, that makes for a LARGE banner template.

Another suggestion: I don't think that the sentence about removing the parameters once an image/map/infobox has been added is necessary for the template. Newbies who add any images 1) probably wouldn't look at the talk page anyway 2) would have troubles editing the template.

I agree that there should probably be a disputed parameter instead of the attention parameter.

Another area that probably needs standardization is the naming of the banner templates themselves. I've seen both the whole name of the WikiProject (e.g. {{WikiProject California}}) and a short version (e.g. {{WPSchools}}. I'd settle for WP:COUNCIL keeping a directory of the names of the banners. ^BlankVerse 16:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I've added "disputed" to the template and enabled it for the WP:California demo template, but I haven't removed "attention" or added "disputed" to the other templates for now. The fact that I do have to add it to each calling template highlights one of the drawbacks of using a generic template (it actually took me a minute to remember that after I added "disputed" to the base template).

The copy about removing the imageneeded param came from {{TrainsWikiProject}}. I'm not particularly tied to it, but I don't want to do too much on the actual text unless the idea actually gets some acceptance. I brought it up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Guide#WikiProject Banners (and more generally, naming conventions) and got no response...

As for the template naming issue, this was brought up with the Council recently (in the discussion linked in the previous paragraph) and did not get a favorable response. I think you're right that the best to expect is that the Council would keep track of the template names. We might also be able to get agreement that there should at least always be a redirect from "Template:WikiProject Project name" to the project's preferred name for the template. Mike Dillon 18:18, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I missed one of your points. Regarding the assessment/comments subpage, besides the inconsistencies that you cite, the other problem I've seen is that multiple projects might want to use the same name for their assessment subpage, which I've found kind of confusing when I've come across it. Unfortunately, I can't recall which article I saw this on, but it should be possible to work out by consistently using sections on the assessment page or some other convention. The problem is that the WikiProjects generally don't like being told what to do and they do not all know about or pay attention to WP:COUNCIL. Mike Dillon 18:22, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

The Council is something that was probably needed, but I HATE the name. Also, the one experience that I had with them is when I made a comment on one of their pages that was based upon my exerience setting up the two California WikiProjects and the response that I got back I interpreted as a serious ownership problem. If that's they way they've been with most people, they are going to get ignored.

Furthermore, the original notice that they left on all the WikiProjects about setting up for the article assessments was rather rambling and I think that many WikiProjects ignored it. -Just my dos centavos.-

Finally, thanks for all your work on this. ^BlankVerse 20:31, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I saw an interesting addition today. I didn't look at the template code, but apparently {{WikiProject Dallas}} looks to see if the /comments subdirectory exists, and it it doesn't, it then adds "Explanation Needed!" to the banner. I think the exclamation point is a little overblown, but otherwise, this idea might be worth adding. ^BlankVerse 23:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

After thinking about it some more, "imageneeded" (instead of "imagesneeded") is probably the best name for that parameter. If nothing else, it will match the singular mapneeded and infobox needed. ^BlankVerse 18:06, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Some more ideas: Look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Films/Assessment where there are a few additional article classes. My personal opinion is that you don't need the Cat, Template, and Disamb classes, which can all go into the NA class. I do, however like the List class, because I've never been happy using one of the regular classes to assess List articles. ^BlankVerse 08:13, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Another thought after further reflections: "unref" should be changed to "refneeded" or "referencesneeded" to match the other parameters. ^BlankVerse 09:11, 6 January 2007 (UTC)