Template talk:Infobox Former Country/Categories

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This looks marvellous. Good formatting and easy maintenance. One reason why I didn't want to expand the categories handling further before was that a specified documentation in some form was necessary. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to allocate the time to do this myself, but this will do very nicely. Excellent!

I can see that there has been other developments concerning other parts of the project as well and I will try to address them as I go along. Great work! -- Domino theory 17:48, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

With all of the categories that the infobox supports, I thought a table like this is necessary to show the logic that the infobox follows. From here, it should be easier to see what areas require further work and what possible errors the infobox may have. Expanded syntax information like this is, I think, the right way to explain clearly how the infobox should be used. - 52 Pickup 09:30, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Again, I think it's excellent and I agree with you. This might also be the right place to introduce a form of wish list regarding alternatives not yet implemented for categorization. There are more options that we should allow and more alternatives that are actually needed, but I believe that the criterion for inclusion should still be relatively conservative.

Apart from the objective of an all over simplicity and flexibility of the template, I believe that there should be a measure of caution against adding too much functionality that might ultimately affect the usage of Wikipedia resources. The basic functionality of the template and the categories should still display properly even at those times of the day when retrieval of an article from Wikipedia servers are slow.

The catch-all solution for values that are not implemented has to be improved. One choice it to abolish it completely, another is to set up special maintenance categories to make it easier to clean-up infoboxes where editors are not aware of how to use the functionality. -- Domino theory 15:55, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

This is definitely the place for a category wish-list - I'll start a new section below for possible new categories. The "none of the above" categories are a great idea. We should regularly check what is in these categories to see what new categories could be used - this is the opposite of the wish-list, but it does make sense to allow the categories to grow organically.

One issue has just come up with these categories. There are already categories for Belgian, German, Scottish and Swedish colonies but they use different names to those generated by the templateare (i.e. "xxxx colonies" instead of "Former xxxx colonies" even though they do cover former colonies). I'll try clear this up with the category people to see what should be done. - 52 Pickup 18:09, 12 November 2006 (UTC)