Talk:Advancement and recognition in the Boy Scouts of America

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	Advancement and recognition in the Boy Scouts of America is part of the Scouting WikiProject, an effort to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Scouting and Guiding on the Wikipedia. This includes but is not limited to boy and girl organizations, WAGGGS and WOSM organizations as well as those not so affiliated, country and region-specific topics, and anything else related to Scouting. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
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The following users are actively contributing on this topic and may be able to help with questions about verification and sources: Gadget850 (Talk)

Archives November 2005 – Jul 2006

[edit] Improvements

I think the detailed Cub Scout through Venturing sections should now go away and be replace with short summaries and main articles. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 14:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I could support that if I thought there would ever be enough information for those individual articles to be significant on their own. I doubt that will be the case. I would recommend against this for now, for the same reason I support merging sub-articles into Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. --NThurston 15:50, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Let me rephrase this. Currently we have a duplication of sections between this article and the Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Varsity Scout, Venturing and Sea Scout articles. For example, the Cub Scout advancement section here is (or should be) a duplicate of the advancement section in [[Cub Scouts (Boy Scouts of America)]|]. I can't remember the reasoning for this now, but this was done when we moved a split a lot of stuff a year ago. Having five duplicate sections between the articles makes for maintenance overhead while trying to keep them synchronized. I propose to keep a short overview here, with a main link to the advancement section in the appropriate article. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gadget850 (talk • contribs) 10:26, 9 February 2007.

I see the problem. For example, the same section appears here and in Boy Scouts (Boy Scouts of America). There are a few options:

• 1. Your suggestion: Designate the "main" section as the section in the program article. A shortened version is placed here with a link.
• 2. The complement: Designate the "main" section as the section here. The program articles contain a shortened summary with a link here.
• 3. Template: Create five templates where advancement editing should take place. The information is automatically included in both articles.

There are other options, but I think these represent the three most logical things to consider because they assure that all the information is included and accessible. My preference would be #3 with sufficient documentation in a comment near that section so that people could figure out how to edit it. I propose to try that first. If it doesn't work, then I propose #2 as my next choice. --NThurston 17:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

The suggestion for #3 has come up before. I would love to do it this way, but per Wikipedia:Template namespace: "Templates should not masquerade as article content in the main article namespace; instead, place the text directly into the article." I suspect this is because novice editors would not easily be able to make changes and the text would be in the wrong namespace (apparently this is a bad thing). --Gadget850 ( Ed) 17:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, we could be WP:BOLD and see what happens. I'm game. I think the masquerade clause might not apply so much where content is to be included on multiple articles. The other argument is valid. It does make it more complicated to edit, but that can be addressed to a degree with commented instructions. What do you think? --NThurston 18:10, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Hold on. I think there might be a way to transclude article sections as if they were templates. So the info could be in one article and transclude into the other. Give me a bit to explore and figure this out. --NThurston 18:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

We can transclude "part" of an article, but only one part. Or at least, I haven't figure out a way to have five parts of an article each transclude to a separate article. However, we can transclude one part of five different articles into a single article. So, if the Boy Scouts page has a part (and just one part) that we want to transclude into the Advancement article it can be done. Same for each of the other pages. In reading through guidelines looking for a way to do it slicker, I also found this: Help:Template#Pages_with_a_common_section which is exactly our case. They propose creating each "part" as it own page in Main: space, and transcluding them into the two main articles. So there is precedent for doing it that way. --NThurston 18:59, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I wish they had an example of this- it would be a lot clearer. This would be a very useful method. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 19:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Been looking and haven't found one. It was also interesting that the "content" could be in template or in Main. I think you have discovered some sentiment against Template. If we're going to do this, let's do it in Main: and make sure that the articles are structured to be as independent as possible, but clearly labelled as "C" pages to avoid attack. --NThurston 19:45, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I found the SubArticle template- this goes on the talk page and alerts editors that sections are replicated in other articles. It isn't perfect, but it does give us a bit of a stick if we revert stuff. It might also be useful to keep a list on the talk pages of sub-articles. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 14:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)