627:, "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.
303:
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 ;)
72:, 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.
249:. 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.
100:; 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
818:
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
660:
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
454:
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
843:
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
793:
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
611:
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,
752:
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
583:
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
496:
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
383:
I wonder if adding a logoneeded parameter would be a good idea. My reasoning is that searching for good
Knowledge (XXG)-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
302:
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
483:
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.
271:
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
482:
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
468:
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
252:
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
642:
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
817:
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.
936:
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.
357:(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.
415:
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
687:
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
256:
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
332:
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.
160:
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
205:
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.
167:
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
909:
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.
865:
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.-
632:
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
164:
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.
921:
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.
674:), 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:
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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
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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
578:? It's something that probably should be discussed at the WikiProject Council, because the issue probably involves more than just the California WikiProjects.
86:(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.)
78:
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
777:
710:
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.
776:. 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
933:
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Also, a couple of wish-list parameters, although I will admit that I want them mostly because of the rather braindamaged MediaWiki search engine:
191:
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
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it makes it confusing for people working in multiple WikiProjects. I ended up making it "imageneeded" and "imagedetails" in the generic template.
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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 ;)
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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.
514:
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...
595:
After sleeping on things, I think that the parameter should probably be imagesneeded since most articles really need more than one image.
948:
Another thought after further reflections: "unref" should be changed to "refneeded" or "referencesneeded" to match the other parameters.
371:
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104:, my current template actually covers a lot of ground. You're right that it doesn't easily handle some of the more evolved WikiProjects.
38:
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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.
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I think you're right that the parameter should be "imageneeded"; I just made it "Imageneeded" because you asked me to copy it from
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entries instead of M * N, where "M" is the number of edits to the shared template and "N" is the number of transcluding articles).
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edit made to it; that's why edit wars on highly-used templates have sometimes resulted in the developers becoming quite annoyed.)
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Another parameter that should be useful for most State WikiProjects would be a county parameter (e.g. county=Los
Angeles County).
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some time soon, since there have been a couple recent discussions that off-handedly mentioned such a template in the last week.
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282:; other projects may be willing to lose control over part of the template's code in exchange for not having to maintain it.)
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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
96:
Thanks for your note. I'm well aware that a generic WikiProject template will not work across the board, as I mentioned at
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category naming is one of the harder parts to "generify", so adding more categories adds more potential for naming issues.
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Some templates also include non-standard conditional logic based on the values of various parameters—even standard ones.
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should probably work for most cases (or should be acceptable to those projects that decide to use the template).
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The templates used by the larger and more complicated (in structural terms) WikiProjects, such as
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While I hate to rain on your parade, there are a few issues that you might want to keep in mind:
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disputed: This would be for any article that has a current dispute tag other than unreferenced.
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I was just going to ask another question: what do you think the relationship should be between
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need to be edited fairly regularly, though—particularly if it supported per-project parameters.
285:(And, sadly, no, the job queue isn't very smart at all, and will purge the template once for
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Also, it may be possible to handle the custom sections like I did with the beer listings in
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actually took me a minute to remember that after I added "disputed" to the base template).
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problem. If that's they way they've been with most people, they are going to get ignored.
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get agreement that there should at least always be a redirect from "Template:WikiProject
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I saw an interesting addition today. I didn't look at the template code, but apparently
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know once you have something you think would be usable, and we can include it in the
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Ah, the interesting things one can discover when going through Recent changes. ;-)
349:
You might be interested in the generic WikiProject template I've been working on at
344:
You're welcome. I'm glad to help improve the state of the
California Wikiprojects.
678:. Boy, if you use ALL the parameters, that makes for a LARGE banner template.
560:? I see now that you made it a child category yesterday. I guess that works.
132:. Feel free to let me know what you think on my talk page or comment at
134:
Knowledge (XXG) talk:WikiProject
Templates#Generic WikiProject template
98:
Knowledge (XXG) talk:WikiProject Templates#Generic WikiProject template
535:
On second thought, I don't think the county parameter is that useful.
661:
better to create a new namespace (assessments?) for those pages.
501:}}, albeit not to the project coordinator's full satisfaction ;)
576:
Category:Knowledge (XXG) requested photographs in California
558:
Category:Knowledge (XXG) requested photographs in California
697:
I agree that there should probably be a disputed parameter
39:
User talk:Kirill Lokshin/Archive 2#Re: WikiProject banners
766:
The copy about removing the imageneeded param came from
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and if adding them is too complicated, I'll understand.
327:
User talk:BlankVerse#Re: Template:WikiProject California
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talk page. In the meantime, I'm going to have a look at
411:
BTW: I saw you corrected imageneeded to Imageneeded at
323:
User talk:Mike Dillon#Template:WikiProject California
798:" to the project's preferred name for the template.
374:. I like it, especially the infoboxneeded parameter.
734:keeping a directory of the names of the banners.
195:(the project page does say it's inactive...).
8:
934:Knowledge (XXG):WikiProject Films/Assessment
176:as an alternative to the hand-coded version.
882:Finally, thanks for all your work on this.
572:Category:California articles needing images
554:Category:California articles needing images
179:Good luck with getting things to work! :-)
193:Knowledge (XXG) talk:WikiProject Templates
499:User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox/Military History
245:If you don't mind, please have a look at
35:User talk:Mike Dillon#WikiProject banners
624:
7:
584:articles are only in one category.
372:User:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner
351:User:Mike Dillon/WikiProject banner
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643:planning on bringing it up with
421:WikiProject Southern California
316:Template:WikiProject California
233:and see what I can do with it.
635:Category:Disputed ... articles
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720:) and a short version (e.g.
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956:09:11, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
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353:. There are some demos at
932:Some more ideas: Look at
701:the attention parameter.
676:User:BlankVerse/Sandbox3
413:Talk:Compton, California
355:User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox
102:User:Mike Dillon/Sandbox
780:and got no response...
715:WikiProject California
18:User talk:Mike Dillon
623:As mentioned in the
321:Reconstructed from
33:Reconstructed from
27:WikiProject banners
904:WikiProject Dallas
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796:Project name
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161:extensively.
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824:Mike Dillon
800:Mike Dillon
649:Mike Dillon
562:Mike Dillon
516:Mike Dillon
359:Mike Dillon
305:Mike Dillon
263:Mike Dillon
235:Mike Dillon
197:Mike Dillon
149:Mike Dillon
138:Mike Dillon
67:WPBiography
820:WP:COUNCIL
732:WP:COUNCIL
699:instead of
645:WP:COUNCIL
247:my sandbox
221:WP:COUNCIL
170:WP:COUNCIL
846:ownership
725:WPSchools
688:template.
277:WPMILHIST
228:WPMILHIST
111:job queue
57:WPMILHIST
384:can do.
261:much).
287:every
113:(see
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259:too
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