Template talk:ArthropodTalk
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[edit] Template size
The size of this template is much much too large. I'm going to chop it down a bit. Kaldari 20:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- This template was so big and complicated, I just remade it from scratch. Feel free to revert if you like the previous version better, although I would suggest at least editing it down to a reasonable size. Kaldari 21:19, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
At another editor's request, I'm going to revert the template for now, until I have time to make a new version with more functionality. Kaldari 21:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, it's a bit big, that's true. But if streamlining it, please be sure that the functionality is retained, especially the rating system. --Sarefo 21:23, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I reverted, you just annihilated hours of work. As I said in my edit summary, I will try to get rid of some of it. However you should realise that talk page templates are commonly this size, if they want to accomodate article quality and importance assessment. The purpose of this tempalte isn't only to link to the wikiproject!
- If you want to compare to other templates with article assessment schemes, see {{WPBeatles}} or {{WPSpiders}}. I will, however try to change it to a more manageable format without losing any functions ASAP. IronChris | (talk) 21:28, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
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This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. |
 FA |
This article has been rated as FA-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ] |
| Core | This article is listed on this Project's core biographies page. |
Have you seen this talk page? It's rediculous how much you have to scroll through to get to the talk page discussions. Check out the wave of the future. I would shoot for something closer to the example at right, than the monsterous Beatles template. Kaldari 21:45, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- I agree that some pages get pretty clogged up (though one could argue that it doesn't take much effort to scroll down). I do not oppose changing the format to something more concise, such as these {{Album}} and {{WikiProject Rugby union}}. But I definitely don't want to lose any of the functions of the template; note that both the above templates do not enable comments for improvement, for example, even though they are not much smaller. Obviously, the fact that this template involves ParserFunctions, magic words and lots of stuff that I don't understand makes changing format a tricky matter. As it is I'm having the greatest trouble preventing the text in the comments from overlapping over the importance box on the right. IronChris | (talk) 22:45, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Try out the new version I created. It supports quality and importance assessment (although only quality is displayed in the box). It also supports comments for assessments. See it in action on Talk:Ant. Is there anything it's missing? Kaldari 23:20, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- From what I see it looks good, except that it doesn't show the importance level. Can you fix that? IronChris | (talk) 23:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- At WikiProject Biography we actually found it more practical to keep the importance hidden (showing it only in the category assignment). The problem with showing the importance assignment is that the editors of the article always want to increase the importance regardless of what the project people think the importance actually is. Everyone feels that their pet article is more important than all the others, and no one wants their article considered "low importance" no matter how obscure it is. Until we started hiding it, we had to spend more time correcting importance assessments than making new ones. After we changed it, we could still make use of the importance assessments through the categories, so we didn't lose any functionality. But regardless, I'm not really an active WikiProject Arthropod member, so I don't want to tell you guys how to do things. I just wanted to explain why I left out the importance in the talk box :) Kaldari 05:09, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, I fixed the template, everything is in working order now. I just thought about something: some WikiProjects use two different sizes of talk page templates, one "normal sized" one like this one, and one compact one like the one you showed above. If you still think that the template is over-large, why don't you create a compact version, on a page like Template:WPArthropods? Then pages that have multiple templates could use that one, and pages which only have the one template (the vast majority) can use this one. IronChris | (talk) 04:40, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
- That sounds like a good idea. BTW, here's an example of the problem with transcluding the assessment comments into the talk page templates themselves: Talk:Spider. As you can see, for articles that have more than one project template, the material is duplicated. That's why most talk page templates simply link to the comments (as well as to save space). Although this might not be much of a problem for arthropod articles, it has certainly been an issue for other types of articles and I could imagine it becoming a problem here at some point. Imagine, for example, if templates for WikiProject Animals and WikiProject Halloween were added to the Spider page, each with their own copy of the comments. At the rate that WikiProjects are currently proliferating, I imagine most articles will soon fall under the jurisdiction of multiple projects. Einstein is already under 5! Kaldari 06:01, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
