Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General

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Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General Discussion Archive 1
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General Discussion Archive 2

[edit] From Template talk:Infobox british hills (no image)

I just stumbled across this template. People may not know about the infobox we're using for mountains (anywhere in the globe). See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains.

How do people feel about using the Mountain template? Rows within the WikiProject Mountains template come in groups. So, if you feel that British hills need more information that a generic mountain, we can add additional rows to the infobox.

-- hike395 07:14, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

The British mountain/hill infoboxes currently show the pieces of information that seem relevant to British mountains (UK Grid Ref, etc.), and not those that are irrelevant (no-one knows who first climbed Snowdon, and no-one cares). While it would certainly be possible to customise the generic infobox to include those data that we use regularly, and exclude the things that are not applicable, I can't see the point. It seems much easier simply to leave things as they are and accept than British hills use a different infobox to those elsewhere. This is not unreasonable, since hillwalking is much more popular in Britain than elsewhere, especially of smaller peaks, or at least so it seems to me. It would perhaps be an improvement to have the British and global infoboxes resemble each other in terms of layout and colour, but I can't see any good reason for trying to unify them beyond that. (If that were to go ahead, I would also say that I prefer the current layout of the British infoboxes to the global ones!) --Stemonitis 07:44, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Agree completley with Stemonitis. Grinner 09:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

It's a pity to have separate infoboxes. Part of the goal of Wikipedia is uniformity of presentation: that is what makes it look like a professional encyclopedia. That's why there are endless discussions at Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

I think it is worth discussing further, to see if we can find some compromise between the two approaches. The "row group" approach is very flexible --- we can accomodate any addition or deletion of rows. Therefore, it's just a disagreement about layout and color, which I think we can discuss. Can we discuss at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General ? Thanks! -- hike395 17:34, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I can see changing to "row groups" will just create lots of work for no purpose. We can get "uniformity of presentation" by altering the format of one of the infoboxes. As Stem says I too prefer the current British Hill Info box, but am prepared to be flexible. Grinner 14:28, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

I think we only need to change Template:Infobox british hills and similar templates to use rows like Template:Mtnbox start. I'm not proposing going through and changing all UK and Ireland hill articles just to adjust the formatting: I agree, that would be too much work.

The advantage of converting the UK infobox templates to use the Mtnbox row templates is that, if we change the format again, we only have to change it in one place --- Mtnbox. Otherwise, we collectively have to remember to change it in several places. The disadvantage is that the UK and Ireland hill templates become meta-templates, which have very poor loading performance. We decided to avoid meta-templates in the Mtnbox templates, because of this.

Ben Nevis
Ben Nevis view from Banavie to the north.
Elevation:	1344 m (4409 ft)
Location:	Lochaber, Scotland
Range:	Grampian Mountains
Relative height	1344m
Coordinates:	56°47′49.15″N, 5°0′17.22″WCoordinates: 56°47′49.15″N, 5°0′17.22″W
Topo map:	Ordnance Survey Landranger 41
OS grid reference:	NN166713
Listing:	Munro, Marilyn (hill)

Regardless of whether we use meta-templates, or just copy the formatting, we have to decide on whether to merge the formatting of the infoboxes. So we can have something to look at, I took the liberty of converting Ben Nevis over to the Mtnbox templates (see right). I had to add "relative height", "UK" rows. I separated out "relative height", because I think it is a good optional row for any peak on the globe. I kept the rest of the existing infobox's rows in the "UK" template.

This may look very strange to you. It looks very familiar to me, because we've made hundreds of infoboxes that look like this. The main difference in formatting is: the brown color, the ordering of the rows, the left justification of the row headers, squeezing the row headers. I'd like to have a discussion, hopefully involving people in the WikiProject and people who have used the UK and Ireland hill infoboxes, to see if we can find some compromise. The formats are pretty close. Can we find some compromise to make a uniform infobox?

Thanks! -- hike395 18:35, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not against this per se, but I would like these points addressed please:

Surely this will take a lot of work to implement in changing over the 100+ articles that currently use the British infoboxes?
No Brits ever use latitude and longitude, it is not even shown on UK maps. Is there an easy way to obtain this data? eg. can it be coverted by a script from the gridref?
There is also the double summit infobox and the no image one, look at Beinn Alligin and The Cobbler for examples.

Grinner 10:22, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Grinner, for your good questions. I believe the answers are:

It'll be very easy, actually. All we'll do is modify the template article Template:Infobox british hills and all similar templates, to call the Mtnbox templates. We don't have to change the articles at all, if we don't use the latitude/longitude data. The only downside will be an empty "range" field in all of the articles. Alternatively, we can add an additional "range" argument to the british infobox, and have it default to empty, so that people can eventually fill it in.
The latitude/longitude is an optional row, we don't have to use it, if you don't want to. Or, we can try and dig up the data. It's easier just to leave it alone.
No image is easy. There is a {{Mtnbox start nopic}} template that does not require a photo. The double summit infobox is quite nifty! I volunteer to change its format to match the other infoboxes. In other words, leave it as a special case.

In summary, I think we can make only limited changes to make the UK infobox match the format of the global infobox without changing the articles. Does this sound good to you? (Are any other UK hill participants reading?) -- hike395 04:03, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

OK that all seems fine to me. I will go and leave some messages with other regular contributors to the UK hill articles as you suggest. On a rather unrelated note, can I just throw in to the melting pot that I don't really like the "muddy brown" colour of the Mtnbox. I't not a deal breaker (wink) but just thought I'd mention it! Grinner 09:20, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Just been thinking further. Looking at the Ben Nevis box above, I see that you have placed both "country" and "area" into the location field, and added a "range" field. The British hill boxes don't have a range field so this will appear blank won't it?

I can't get very worked up about it either way – while consistency of style is desirable, harmonisation for harmonisation's sake is a bad thing if it introduces problems which weren't there before. However, I prefer the look of the Mtnbox – and am happy with the "muddy brown" (which is an unusual sort of mud, anyway!). No objections to the proposed changes. StephenDawson 10:21, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

I like the Mtnbox thing; it looks to be quite flexible and may possibly prevent some time-consuming changes down the line. Will take a while to get used to the new format though! Hopefully the issue with 'Range' can be easily worked around? — pmcm 10:32, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

OK, I've made "norange" templates (which were under discussion, anyway), and so that eliminate the empty "range" row. So, Ben Nevis should look like this:

Ben Nevis
Ben Nevis view from Banavie to the north.
Elevation:	1344 m (4409 ft)
Location:	Lochaber, Scotland
Prominence:	1344m
Topo map:	Ordnance Survey Landranger 41
OS grid reference:	NN166713
Listing:	Munro, Marilyn (hill)

About the brown color: there's not much we can do at this point. We voted on the color ~1 year ago (at the start of the project), and starting making infoboxes with it. Unfortunately, not all infoboxes use the Mtnbox templates, so it would be a lot of work to change. One possible action is to change the color a small amount (making it more grey?), perhaps people would not notice the inconsistency? I'd like to hear from other Project participants before we change the color.

Should I go ahead and change the UK hill templates to use Mtnbox, then?

--- hike395 17:00, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

(Note: I ran into an edit conflict when I first tried to post my comments so there might be duplicate info now). Looks to me like we are close to agreeing that the articles using the British hills template can be converted over to using the more general mtnbox templates which I agree would be better in the long run for layout consistency. As hike395 has pointed out, we can simply modify the British hill infoboxes to call the mtnbox templates as the first stage. This would create meta templates though which are frowned on because of server performance. We should be able to use a bot to convert them all to directly using the mtnbox templates down the road. I should clarify one point made in the above discussion. the {{mtnbox coor dm}} and {{mtnbox coor dms}} are actually meta templates because they call the {{coor dm}} and {{coor dms}}. As for the "range" issue, two new templates to start the infobox are being created to not include the range. They will also be used for other mountains of the world that are not in a range (primarilyy volcanoes such as Mount Kilimanjaro). We are still in the process of converting all the mountain articles from using the old style infobox (HTML table code) to the templates. The new layout looks a lot better though, especially when there is a photo. The mtnbox templates are very flexible in that new optional rows are easily added. On the new "relative height" row, how about naming it "prominence" instead? That way, it should remain one line instead of two which would fit nicely with all the other one line rows. RedWolf 17:18, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

I like "prominence": it's the technically correct term. (I think we should start (optionally) using it for generic mountains, too, it's an interesting fact). Made the change. -- hike395 17:59, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

Adding this new optional row prompted me to search for Mount Logan's prominence — an incredible 5,250 metres (17,225 ft). RedWolf 06:23, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Converting the templates to use Mtnbox

Ouch! I tried to modify Template:Infobox british hills to call the Mtnbox templates, but it failed. There may be multiple reasons, but I did notice that Infobox british hills takes a photo argument of the form [[Image:XXX.jpg|300px]], while Mtnbox start takes it in the form XXX.jpg. I'm not sure how to fix this, there are two ways:

Run a bot (CanisRufus??) to convert the parameter to XXX.jpg. RedWolf, are you up for this?
Give up on using Mtnbox start, just reformat the UK hill infoboxes to look like Mtnbox.

Comments? -- hike395 02:31, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not fussed. If you can run abot to make the changes that is fine with me, but option 2 is alright too. Grinner 09:42, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I think this might be a template calling issue. I don't think the software can handle a parameter from one template being passed as a parameter to another template given the consecutive 5 opening braces. I could be wrong, but that's my educated guess at the moment. I suspect that we will need to go with option 2 at the time. It might be possible to use my bot to convert the articles using the british hills infobox to using the mtnbox templates directly but I'd have to research that a bit further. My bot is using the standard Pywikipedia bot framework which only supplies a standard set of common tasks one might want to automate; templates conversion like this is not one of them. RedWolf 22:56, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Last eruption in infobox?

Some users are starting to add a "Last eruption" row to the infobox for volcanoes. Shall we formalize this in our official template? What constitutes an eruption, anyway? (Seems like a little steam eruption shouldn't count) -- hike395 17:46, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

We could add it to our list of optional table rows. I would agree that a minor steam eruption should not count. RedWolf 05:55, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox border change proposal

Mount Temple
North face of Mt. Temple from Mt. Fairview
Elevation:	3,543 metres (11,624 feet)
Coordinates:	51°21′10″N, 116°12′20″W
Location:	Alberta, Canada
Topo map:	NTS 82N/08
Range:	Canadian Rockies
First ascent:	1894 by Samuel Allen, Walter Wilcox and L.F. Frissel
Easiest route:	scramble (SW)

Another WikiProject I belong to has dropped the border=1 table attribute and uses a style to add a border. I have tweaked the one for Mount Temple to show one possibility. I set the cellspacing to 0 to remove the intervening white spacing that would appear between the rows. The change is to set border=0 and add the following to the table style: border:2px solid #e7dcc3; RedWolf 05:55, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

I added a border-top to the elevation row. RedWolf 07:49, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

I like it!! What do you think of adding border-top to all of the rows (as shown to the right)? -- hike395 14:15, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Mixed to be honest. Either way has about equal result to me although the lines are starting to grow on me. RedWolf 00:15, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

If you think the lines are too "loud", how about 1px lines for the rest? I like this better, too.. -- hike395 11:56, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that works better. (RedWolf's comment continues in next section)

Sounds like we're agreed. On to templates. -- hike395 13:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Templates, again

Before we start making this change, I would like to also propose we switch back to using templates. The biggest problem I have with templates as they stand right now is that one cannot have optional parameters and giving the control necessary to not display them. I do not like having optional sub-templates into building the final table. I propose we have a couple of templates that should handle the majority of cases:

{{Mountain infobox}} would have parms for photo, elevation, coordinates, location, mountain range, topo map, first ascent, easiest route.
{{Mountain infobox basic}} would have parms for elevation, coordinates, location, mountain range, first ascent and easiest route.
{{Mountain infobox topo}} would be like basic but add topo map
{{Mountain infobox geo}} would be infobox parms plus age of rock and mountain type.
{{Volcano infobox}} would be like Mountain infobox but add last eruption and mountain type.

For those that do not fit these templates, keep using the existing raw wiki table format. Using multiple templates is not ideal that's for sure but the alternatives seem worse. RedWolf 18:24, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

I am also frustrated with templates! I've been holding off, hoping that MediaWiki would be updated, but it doesn't look like it is going to happen.

I've seen a lot of mountain infoboxes (not added by you and me) that are extremely minimial. No photo, just elevation, coordinates, location. Sometimes mountain range, if we're lucky. First ascent and easiest route information is actually not often used.

The problem is, the information is really in orthogonal sections that can get added or not, and we don't want an infinite number of templates. What seems to get added in groups is:

Photo
Mountain range (along with elevation, coordinates, location)
Topo map (along with evelation, coordinates, location)
Mountain type, age of rock
First ascent, route
Mountain type, age of rock, last eruption (for volcanoes)

which 48 different types of templates, by my count. I'm worried about leaving some infoboxes behind, because then we get the worst of both worlds --- templates that may be mysterious to beginning editors and an infobox that is still difficult to update globally.

The problem is, I haven't come up with any great ideas. I believe that the least bad solution is to have the mountain infobox decompose into 8 chunks, each of which would be a template:

{{Mountain start}}
{{Mountain photo}}
{{Mountain location}} (force use of dms template?, perhaps include mountain range in here for simplicity?)
{{Mountain topo}}
{{Mountain geology}}
{{Mountain volcano}}
{{Mountain climbing}}
{{Mountain finish}}

I bet we can shoehorn all existing mountain infoboxes into this format. But, I know you are not in favor of this. Can we discuss further? I'd like to understand why you think this is a bad idea. --- hike395 13:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

A compromise that just occurred to me is to build these lower-level templates, and the a set of higher-level templates (like RedWolf's above) that call the lower-level templates for common cases. This keeps the simplicity of RedWolf's proposal, but allows flexibility to cover all of the infoboxes. -- hike395 13:52, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Yes, as I hinted above, I would be the first to agree that my proposal has problems of its own. Your compromise is the use of meta-templates which are frowned upon due to system performance issues (see Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates. I don't like using the template chunk approach for the following reasons:

you must switch back to using raw HTML table markup for all the templates (not necessarily a big deal really) but I do find the wiki table format easier to use.
increases server load as each template call is another request to basically load another page. So building the infobox could end up being 8-10 page loads (granted, template caching will help).
The infobox parameters are spread across multiple templates and you likely often go hunting for several existing pages that have the templates you want to use. Of course, they would also be listed on one of the project pages but I always copy-paste from a couple pages I know has what I need.

Perhaps as a followup compromise, we design 2 or three "ideal" infoboxes, as I proposed above, which we hope all pages would hope to use eventually. Then, we use the "chunk" approach for those mountains not able to use those templates at the moment due to unknown/missing information. Perhaps we can pare down a few of the chunk templates so we only have 3 or 4 of them. Maybe we can combine the photo into the start so that if there isn't a photo, this can still be accommodated gracefully. RedWolf 05:36, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

After some template experimentation, I guess I'm leading towards the multi-template chunk approach. To reduce the number of templates, I suggest changing the ordering of some of the rows. The coordinates linking will mean we will need to add two separate templates to handle the cases of dms and dm. So, similar to what hike395 proposed above:

{{Mountain start photo}} Name, Photo, Photo info, Elevation, Location, Range
{{Mountain start}} Name, Elevation, Location, Range
{{Mountain coor dm}}
{{Mountain coor dms}}
{{Mountain topo}}
{{Mountain geology}} Rock type, Age of rock
{{Mountain volcano}} Type, Last eruption
{{Mountain ascent}} First ascent, Easiest route
{{Mountain finish}}

Ack, so many templates but the table html is getting to the point where it's getting messy. RedWolf 05:24, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not so great. Should we do it, or just leave it alone?

A few notes:

Are we going to have meta-templates for coor? Or just subst in the current coor dms template and hope that they don't change? In fact, they are sure to change as soon as Egil convinces the developers to automatically parse the dms strings. But, that could be years.
Coor template takes an optional last argument. For mountains, it's always type:mountain. But, it is also useful to put region:US or region:CH or ... in, so that the map page that is generated doesn't show map sources that cannot work. I guess we'll just add another field to our templates, too.
If you really don't like having coor dms and coor dm, you can force people to use a bogus 0 second field.
I don't mind re-arranging the row orders. I assume that CanisRufus will do this all semi-magically?

Thanks for working this out!!! -- hike395 05:57, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm thinking we go ahead with the chunk templates but I think I'm still going to add a couple of all-encompasing templates as I originally suggested. I think by having just a few, we can push ourselves to find the extra info needed to use one of these few mega templates. Adding the extra styles to an existing infobox is somewhat painful. I think by using the templates, it might encourage others to provide more info as I think the existing chunk of table code can be daunting to newcomers — now add the extra style tag and it becomes bewildering. Someday I hope the template mechanism improves to make this easier on us to implement a variable content infobox. As to your notes above:

We can't call another template as a parameter to a template so our dms template will basically accept the same parms as the coor ones and then call that template.
We can have separate templates for specifying dms and just dm.
Unfortunately, the software that CanisRufus uses is not quite that powerful to transform the existing infoboxes to template format. However, once everything is in template format, it might be possible for the bot to assist in future changes.

My last comment is to whether we should use mountain or mtnbox as the prefix for the template names? We already have the existing {{mountain}} which might cause confusion to others if we use the same prefix for the infobox. By using mtnbox we sort of fall in line with the taxobox name used for the taxonomy infobox templates. RedWolf 07:55, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

mtnbox is OK with me. This is going to be painful without a bot. I'm happy to help, but it will be slow. --- hike395 12:44, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I guess I wasn't totally correct about the software issues. I should say that the "out of the box" functionality would not work well to transform the infoboxes but I might be able to write a customized module that will help. I'll take a stab at it and see if I can come up with something to assist. RedWolf 16:24, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

I attempted to write a bot in Java to do this but ran into some sort of page update issue that the server refuses to tell me about (it ignores my attempts to update a page via the bot). Alas, the manual approach will have to do for now. RedWolf June 29, 2005 04:06 (UTC)

[edit] And again...

Okay, so the templates are working for the most part but there are a few articles where range is not applicable. Generally, these are volcanoes but there are some exceptions. For example, Mount Fuji, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Sunflower. I think we need to add another template to not include a range. Conceivably, we would need to add two templates to coincide with {{mtnbox start}} and {{mtnbox start nopic}} but I propose we have just one as we seem to have photos more than not for these "exceptions". How about {{mtnbox start nr}} where nr stands for no range. Or {{mtnbox start norange}}? The floor is open to suggestions. RedWolf June 29, 2005 04:06 (UTC)

Ah, Mount Sunflower. See [1]. Anyway, I see your point. Instead of a different template, how about just filling in with "None" or "N/A" ? Makes things simpler. -- hike395 June 29, 2005 05:26 (UTC)

Yea, I read part of that "difficult" ascent of Sunflower when the pic was added to the article, quite amusing. True, we could just use "N/A" or "None" as you suggested for simplicity. I just thought that some might find the addition of "Range" for a mountain not contained within one, rather silly. Of course, if templates supported optional parameters, this would be trivial to handle. RedWolf July 1, 2005 07:14 (UTC)

Revisiting: looks like we'll need a "norange" template to make the UK hill participants happy (see top of page). So, I agree with making extra norange templates. I'll make {{mtnbox start norange}} and {{mtnbox start norange nopic}}. Not so elegant, but looks like it is needed for multiple reasons. -- hike395 16:35, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Templates

{{Template:Mtnbox start|Mtnbox start}}

Name, Photo, Caption, Elevation, Location, Range
{{Template:Mtnbox start nopic|Mtnbox start nopic}}

Name, Elevation, Location, Range
{{Template:Mtnbox coor dms|Mtnbox coor dms}}

9 positional parameters - same as {{Template:coor dms|coor dms}}
{{Template:Mtnbox coor dm|Mtnbox coor dm}}

7 positional parameters - same as {{Template:coor dm|coor dm}}
{{Template:Mtnbox topo|Mtnbox topo}}

1 positional parameter
{{Template:Mtnbox geology|Mtnbox geology}}

Type, Age
{{Template:Mtnbox volcano|Mtnbox volcano}}

Type, Age, Last eruption
{{Template:Mtnbox climb|Mtnbox climb}}

First ascent, Easiest route
{{Template:Mtnbox finish|Mtnbox finish}}

[edit] Example

Mount Temple
North face of Mt. Temple from Mt. Fairview
Elevation:	3,543 metres (11,624 feet)
Location:	Alberta, Canada
Range:	Canadian Rockies
Coordinates:	51°20′10″N, 116°12′20″WCoordinates: 51°20′10″N, 116°12′20″W
Topo map:	NTS 82N/08
First ascent:	1894 by Samuel Allen, Walter Wilcox and L.F. Frissel
Easiest route:	scramble (SW)

[edit] Category:Peaks of India

Someone has added the subcategory Category:Peaks of India under Category:Mountains of India and moved some of the mountains to which they might consider "peaks" to it although I would dispute Kanchenjunga being a peak rather than the mountain. In any case, I don't think we need to subcat mountains based on whether they are technically considered peaks due to topographic prominence. I am suggesting that this category be listed for deletion on CFD and that the project policy is that this subcategorization is not to be done. RedWolf July 8, 2005 20:24 (UTC)

Agree -- hike395 July 9, 2005 02:21 (UTC)

[edit] WikiTax

I just stumbled across this template and converted it to proper WikiTax and standards compliant CSS. I also added the class="toccolours" in-house styling, which is standard for infobox tempaltes. Is this a problem? ed g2s • talk 18:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

"WikiTax"? You mean Wiki table syntax? We used straight HTML code because MediaWiki could not properly handle a table being built using multiple templates. Perhaps this has been fixed in 1.5? I don't know. Where is this "toccolours" defined as a standard for infoboxes? Did you actually look at some of articles using the templates after you applied your changes? The color was no longer applied consisently and we lost the separating lines between rows. RedWolf 18:18, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

WikiTax is indeed a (fairly) commonly used abbreviation for Wiki table syntax. MediaWiki has been able to build WikiTax tables from multiple templates since early versions of 1.4 IIRC (at least a year ago though), but yes, it didn't used to be able to handle them. "toccolours" is not a defined standard anywhere, it is hard to write down a hard set of rules for infoboxes, as they are they very varied, but there is work towards a "infobox" class. Until this happens, "toccolours" suits the purpose of skinning infoboxes properly. I tested the box on Matterhorn, which I've now discovered doesn't use all of the templates, so I missed a few, hence the incorrect rendering, but if I change them all, it should be fine. ed g2s • talk 19:01, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Your changes keep losing the color on the left hand side of the infobox as well as the dividing lines. Did you only test it with evil empire IE? Please do not impose an undocumented "standard" which has not been proposed nor reviewed (or not that I'm been made aware of at this point). Optimizing or correcting CSS is one thing, changing the visual appearance is quite another. RedWolf 02:02, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Most infoboxes don't use the colour on the side, or dividing lines. The gap between the columns and the emboldening of the label text is usually sufficient. Adding blocks of colour to an article which don't convey any extra information is not a great idea. CSS extra to the stylesheet should only be used to assist layout or appearance when required. The undocumented "standard" is the appearance of the wikipedia skin (monobook.css by default). The infobox class was designed to match the image boxes, the TOCs, the menu boxes and most of the navigation boxes. If you want to change the default Wikipedia skin, this is not the place to start. ed g2s • talk 03:18, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I still emphasize that there is no wikipedia standard as yet for infobox layout. Unilaterally Imposing what "you" feel the standard should be on a project's infobox is not the way to go. Please write a proposal and get it approved before stomping on project infoboxes. RedWolf 03:30, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

You imply that this is my personal preference of how boxes should appear, yet the current version looks completely different to the rest of the site. I don't understand your logic there. The infobox class was proposed, discussed and implemented. How else would it get into the stylesheet? ed g2s • talk 14:12, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I've reverted back to the WikiProject-agreed-upon infobox. Let's discuss this and come to a consensus.

I've been looking through the WikiPolicies, looking for guidance. I couldn't find any policy or discussion that mandates the use of the infobox class for infoboxes: Ed -- if there is such a policy, please point it out. What I did find was at the beginning of Wikipedia:Infobox, which states

If you want to redesign an Infobox, please take it up in the appropriate WikiProject. Thanks.

So, a discussion and consensus here seems indicated before we institute a design change. (An exact translation into WikiTax seems harmless and doesn't require discussion, I think).

I'm a sucker for stylistic consistency across Wikipedia. However, I agree with RedWolf: right now there is no common styling in infoboxes. Scrolling through Wikipedia:Infobox shows many different styles. We are not the only infobox that has solid colors --- the U.S. Regions infobox also has solid colors, for example.

Given that there is currently no consistency between infoboxes, I don't see a compelling need to use the infobox class. I like the current format. Unless we get a groundswell of non-project-participants who hate our infobox due to its different-ness, I would vote for sticking with the current format.

-- hike395 05:38, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

You seem to be obsessed with finding some sort of written down set of rules on what to do here. Remember most "WikiPolicies" are not formed out of lengthy discussion and debate, but proposal and refinement. You've quoted Wikipedia:Infobox which is no more community consensus than either of our opinions. Either way I would interperet "design" in that context to mean general layout and parameters of the box. Many of the styles on Wikipedia:Infobox are extremely outdated, not least because they have been written to the page with subst: so even if the template has been changed, the infoboxes haven't. If you look at most of the high-use templates (100s if not 1000s of implementations) you will find they use the default skin colours. I am glad that you agree that Wikipedia needs stylistic consistency, which is exactly what using an infobox class is trying to achieve, you can't argue that the class is not consistent with the rest of the site. Issues such as wheter to colour in the left hand column, or wheter to use colons or bold text are minor issues in comparison. Seeing as colouring in the left hand columns can't be done in the infobox class, it would be a pain to have it as a policy, when the simple version works just as well.

Given that there is currently no consistency between infoboxes, I don't see a compelling need to use the infobox class.

This is exactly the reason why we need to use a single class: to give consistency. Once we have a class in place, it can be modified if people have problems with it - it is not set in stone. Either way, using custom coded-css is not the way forward for consistency. ed g2s • talk 14:47, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

No offense, but I find that reasoning somewhat strange. Are you saying that we need to start migrating all the infoboxes at the same time? Because we are doing the migration of infoboxes slowly yet surely. It might take some time. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:07, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Ta bu: not sure if you are addressing me or Ed in the comment above. I would just like to see some evidence that (almost) all infoboxes are going to be converted over, and that the consensus amongst the infobox "guardians" (as Ed calls them) is for uniformity versus project specific information.

Why? Because I prefer our current non-standard infobox to the uniform one. I would hate to give up (my perceived) goodness of our infobox unless infoboxes are really going to be consistent. My concern is that we would throw away the goodness for an elusive uniformity that won't ever happen.

This concern is enhanced by what happened over at Template talk:Infobox pope. It looks like Ed tried to get those folks to use the toccolors class, and they voted overwhelmingly not to use it. If this keeps happening again and again, I don't want to change, either.

Now, I realize that this puts the advocates of uniformity into a terrible bind (the chicken or egg problem). That's why I'd like to see some sort of general discussion about the conversion into infoboxes, somewhere. Like in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, not here. If this discussion involved enough "guardians" of infoboxes, then I would feel comfortable in sacrificing the goodness of our infobox for the overall uniformity of Wikipedia.

If such a discussion took place, I might even hold my nose and speak in favor of uniformity!

I hope I made my position clear. I don't speak for any other project participant (of course), but I bet that my feeling of wanting confidence in the process of unifying infoboxes is shared by many other infobox "guardians".

-- hike395 06:39, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

Were you involved in the design of the monobook skin? Were you involved in the design of image boxes on meta? Before image boxes people just knocked up their own css, leaving a mix of different borders around images and captions. When the new syntax came along which promised uniformity, it was taken up on every image on the project - that's the community consensus. This class is not a fixed design decision, but a way of introducing uniformity. Infoboxes being slightly more complex, the creators get a lot more protective over "their" designs, but eventually they will all be converted, and written into some form of policy (things don't always happen the other way round). I see this more as a developer issue, WikiProjects and editors should concern themselves with content. In the same way that developers do not debate mountain naming conventions, editors don't debate the appearance of the default skin. Your argument that "consistency amongst infoboxes is already a mess, so why bother fixing it?" is fairly counter productive. ed g2s • talk 12:24, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid you misunderstand me. The single sentence quote for me would be, "Infobox consistency is a mess: let's get some community consensus to fix it, and then I'll go along." -- hike395 14:25, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

PLEASE NOTE: Ed has created Wikipedia:Infobox standardisation for a Wikipedia-wide discussion of this topic. All interested parties should continue the discussion at Wikipedia Talk:Infobox standardisation. -- hike395 06:08, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Multiple issues

It seems like there are multiple issues here:

Using Wiki Table Syntax vs HTML - the only objection to this is regarding a now fixed bug, so I think this is fine.
Changing the CSS code - for this, there still seem to be some unresoved issues, so I think this should be put off until they have been discussed and resolved.

One nice thing about dividing up the issue this way is that CSS, unlike WikiTax vs HTML, won't Break The Page if it is partly implemented. So if we can agree to move to WikiTax(but leave the CSS as the old way) - we won't have to worry about Breaking The Page. Which is a Good Thing, I think. Thoughts, ideas, questions, objections? JesseW 05:15, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm perfectly content with using Wiki Table Syntax, deferring any design changes until we finish the discussion, above. -- hike395 06:39, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

As to point 1, using HTML code means less server resources required for page formatting. It takes time for the software to convert from the wiki table markup back to straight html. No objection at all when used directly in articles but when used in templates which tend not to change over time, conversion to the wiki syntax for the sake of making it easier to edit seems rather moot. I'd like to see someone produce timing results for the server to generate a page with templates using HTML code versus wiki syntax code. However, if the software is intelligent enough to cache the converted code and re-use it on additional requests then my performance concern is alleviated for the most part. We all know that the wikis have performance problems more times than not. Adding all these new features in the MediaWiki software is nice, but I think the sites just get slower with every upgrade but I digress here. In any case, if the consensus is that using the wiki table syntax in templates is preferable for "convenience" versus "performance", so be it. As to point 2, my biggest problem with the standardized infobox is that changes were initially made to this project's infobox without any consultation with the Wikiproject. I was not aware of any standardization attempt on infoboxes until changes were made unilaterally. Also, because of the total failure to consult, many infoboxes were broken because the changes were not applied to all the templates (which are listed on the project page but the ultra-conformists failed to make any effort to read). I realize that the members of a project do not "own" the infoboxes but other editors who come along should at least acknowledge that project editors have spent a lot of their own time coming up with a way to standardize the infobox being used. For someone to merrily come along and impose a standard without any consultation what so ever, is just wrong IMHO. {{Mtnbox start}} had an existing talk page which easily identified where people should go to discuss changes before modifications are made. This, however, seems to have been totally ignored. Comments were only added after objections were raised. While generally I agree with standardization, unilaterally imposing it on unsuspecting parties without any prior consultation is just asking for trouble. RedWolf 18:10, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] First ascent

In the interest of countering systemic bias, I think the "First ascent" tag should be changed to "First documented ascent" or something similar. I was looking at the Mount Cameroon page, for example, and I was surprised to see Sir Richard Francis Burton credited with scaling the mountain first. I'm sure the Bakweri people would be surprised as well -- they've been climbing the mountain since pre-colonial days. BrianSmithson 23:50, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Anyone there? Should I take this as agreement that "First ascent" should be changed to "First documented ascent"? BrianSmithson 03:32, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Absolutely NOT. If you want to supplement the first ascent page with what you perceive as a systemic bias, feel free to do so. I, however, object to adding "documented" to the infobox as it adds unnecessary clutter and will force the row to take up two lines. If you can find documentation supporting other people having made a prior first ascent, then feel free to change the first ascent info but you should at least move the info previously in the infobox to the main article text. I suspect that less than 2% of the mountains currently on wikipedia might have a perceived systemic bias towards the first ascent. RedWolf 03:38, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Can a field be removed for only those mountains that need it, or would that require its own template? BrianSmithson 11:42, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I understand where Brian is coming from: I have avoided supplying "first ascent" names for some mountain that is obviously easily climbable by indigenous people with no climbing technology. In these cases, I just list first ascent as "unknown". I also agree with RedWolf that "documented" would junk up the infobox. Can we simply agree not to list a "first ascent" on walk-up mountains? --- hike395 06:50, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a participant in the WikiProject, but I heard about this issue, and I like your solution Hike395. JesseW 07:31, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree that no listing is better than a false listing, but I would go a step further: In addition to listing "uknown" for certain walk-ups, as Hike395 suggests, we should elaborate where a source backs up the notion that a member or members of a particular group climbed the mountain before the documented "first" ascent. For example, if I find a source that says "Archaeological evidence suggests the Foo people have been climbing Mount Foo for centuries", the first ascent field gets marked "anonymous Foo". Tradition could also be cited, as it is in the Mount Fuji article (first ascent: anonymous monk). The first documented ascent is still useful information, and should go to the main article text, as RedWolf suggests. BrianSmithson 11:59, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm perfectly happy with "anonymous Foo" when backed up with a source, with documented ascent being in the main article in that case. -- hike395 05:50, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

I'm in agreement here as well. If there is evidence that local people climbed a mountain well before the first documented ascent, then using "Anonymous Foo" in the infobox is fine with me with the documented first ascent still appearing in the article text. RedWolf 17:42, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Easiest route

Should we have more specific guidelines for stating the difficulty of easiest ascent? Currently the WP:MOUNTAINS guidelines only give examples of "(e.g. snow/ice climb, scramble, hike)", and most mountain pages follow that style. An obvious question is whether to specify the grade as well. In Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General_Discussion_Archive_1, User:RedWolf and User:hike395 have suggested not to; if this is the consensus then it should perhaps be mentioned in WP:MOUNTAINS page. I agree that there is no universal grading system, but I think for climbers even a non-systematic mix of grading systems (like "Alpine AD" here and "YDS 4" there) would be more informative (and shorter) than "snow/ice climb". And non-climbers probably are not interested in the "Easiest route" field in the first place. Ahtih 00:19, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Locale for elevation

[edit] Raw vs cooked heights

I notice that in the pre template (actual page) the data is annointed with [[]]. I am inclinde to think that this could be done in the template, and the unannointed value appear on the actual page. The only I can think is when the state or country in unknown. (or there are two states sharing a mountain). But I think a template could even handle this. -- ¢ NevilleDNZ 04:05, 28 August 2005 (UTC) ¢

[edit] Automatic locale of distance in meters & feet, for example

Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
eg. {{Template:locale length|1000}} yields: Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length
Template:Locale length

If this template is not fully implemented yet, but if it is worth using, then I will change it to include a comma to denote thousands. -- ¢ NevilleDNZ 04:05, 28 August 2005 (UTC) ¢

[edit] Category by height (via template)

The chief advantage is of using such a template is that it takes most of the housework out of creating Categories like the following examples:

Category:British Hills by Height
Category:NZ Mountains by Elevation <= Templates can even be used to auto generate sub categories by country.
Category:Mountains by Elevation (km)

With only minimal house work required. -- ¢ NevilleDNZ 04:05, 28 August 2005 (UTC) ¢

[edit] Future: set height locale in user preference

This I have not figured out how to do user based preference yet. Maybe there is a subst variable somewhere I can use to switch preferences. More research required on this point.-- ¢ NevilleDNZ 04:05, 28 August 2005 (UTC) ¢

[edit] Pronuciation of hills

User:Mark J has suggested a line for pronuciation, and Mtnbox pronunciation was made by User:Stemonitis to this effect. I suggested that this should be discussed here first. The intention is to use this on some British hills, in conjuction with the new template Mtnbox UK. Here for example is Y Lliwedd. The template would of course be usuable on all mountaisn worldwide. By making it optional we don't have to put it onto all hills. This also has the side effect of beginning to move the British hills across to the general mntboxGrinner 10:50, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Y Lliwedd
Y Lliwedd from Snowdon
Elevation:	898 m (2946 ft)
Location:	Snowdonia, Wales
Prominence:	154 m
Topo map:	Ordnance Survey Landranger 115
OS grid reference:	NN166713
Listing:	Marilyn (hill), Hewitt
Translation of name:	Colourless Peak (Welsh)
Pronunciation:	[ə ɬɪwɛð]

I like it! -- hike395 03:13, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

OK, nobody said anything against the idea, so I'm going to put it into a few hills then. Grinner 10:08, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Scrub that I couldn't work out how to type the things! Grinner 10:37, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] British Hill Infoboxes again

Mark J has converted a few hills over to the Mtnbox, in order to make use of the new pronunciation row. However I can see a couple of problems that may need sorted:

Is there any way of handling the Double hill infobox? Beinn Eighe has sadly lost a summit (check through the edit history).
Also we will need a "no image, no range" start-box. Grinner 10:32, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Furthermore, a conversation about Great Mell Fell, yielded more suggestions:

How about we cahnge the MTNbox UK so that it only has grid ref and listing in it, and move the "name" fields (translation, language, pronunciation) to the MTNPronunciation box. These are only relevant for some hills, (e.g not Great Mell Fell, but yes for the Scottish or Welsh ones) and could then be left off. Grinner 11:06, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. That would get rid of a lot of "n/a" and "???" entries on English hills with easy names. Propose it somewhere. I'll be incommunicado for the next week, but you can proxy for me on this one, if needs be. --Stemonitis 12:45, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Excellent idea! I can see the translation/language/pronunciation rows being used worldwide, not just in the UK. Should it be called Mtnbox pronunciation, or Mtnbox language, or something else?

I think I made mtnbox start nopic norange (or was it mtnbox start norange nopic?) already.

The double hill infobox is very nice, I don't think you should lose it. I don't immediately see a way of handling it with row-wise templates (without making an entirely new set).

-- hike395 19:25, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to put back the double hills that have lost them, we'll keep them as a special case then. I shall put the pronucuation info into them, as it is relevenat to most of the hills that use it too.
I'd think that Mtnbox_language would make most sense as a name. The sooner you create the sooner I'll use it!
Found Template:Mtnbox_start_nopic_norange, thanks.

Grinner 11:01, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Hills

I have nominated Category: Hills for deletion - as far as I can tell it serves no useful purpose; there is little to link the few articles in it. The nomination is here, if anybody here has a view plaease feel free to add it. Grinner 13:00, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Templates on the way out

I have created Template:Mtnbox Ireland for Irish hill (north and south). It is the same as the UK box, but links to the Irish grid system. There are no now hills using the NI specific infoboxes so these can be listed for deltetion. Grinner 09:47, 3 October 2005 (UTC).

They are on templates for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#October_3 Grinner 10:00, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Infobox British Hills is no no longer needed either! Thanks to Stemoitis for correcting my woefull attempts at Welsh pronunciation by the way! Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#October_5 Grinner 16:17, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Wow! Great work, Grinner! -- hike395 17:37, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Stemonitis has finished off British hills (no image) too! Grinner 10:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Shared hill names

I've searched Wikipedia but there doesn't seem to be a general consensus (a fact I'm surprised about) on hills that shared names. Particularly in the UK there are several hills with brackets, High Street (Lake District) and Fairfield (Lake District) but some with a comma, High Raise, Langdale and High Seat, Yorkshire Dales. Can someone please tell me which one's right, because a lot of hill pages in the UK are going to need moving and that's going to take a lot of work. --Mark J 15:51, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

It depends on whether the hill is actually a populated area or not. Populated areas tend to use the comma convention but if it's really a hill without anyone living on it (like a true mountain), then the naming convention is to use the parenthesis disambiguation format which is the convention used by this project. RedWolf 17:57, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

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