Template talk:Cleanup/archives/2005

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

This is the 2005 archive. Please do not post new comments on this page; for more recent comments, see the template talk page.

Contents 1 Someone feels 2 Proposed image addition 3 Talk page template? 4 Screen resolution issues 5 higher? 6 Reformed incidental rant 7 Current version

Someone feels

Okay, yes we all feel; but to have Someone feels this article needs to be cleaned up... is ineffective - if this format is be used here, we would have to changed on ALL other tags; Template:Wikify and others, all those delete articles will now have this (my opinion) useless ...Someone feels... Thus, I am going to remove this part of the sentence, if you disagree let me have it. PEACE ~ RoboAction 03:26, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

PS...here is my edit: removing Someone feels

Proposed image addition

The boilerplate seems a bit too subtle. I propose adding an image. I got the idea from Template:Sucks, which got added to BJAODN Page 22, with a cool picture but a message that's a little too blunt.

I propose making Template:Cleanup thus...

This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of article quality. After the article has been cleaned up, you may remove this message. For help, see How to Edit a Page and the Style and How-to Directory.

What do you think? --Kitch 13:04, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• I tried to add the image, but it was reverted. Zscout370 17:17, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Talk page template?

This template is listed on Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup as a talk page template. My change of style to the "CoffeeRoll" standard, as recommended on Wikipedia:Template standardisation was reverted by User:Ec5618. I accept entirely that most references are on an article page not a talk page, but shouldn't this template be consistent with the others? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:31, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I just checked it out and found:

The following tags should all be placed on the article needing cleanup, not on its talk page..

And I kind of prefer the gentle blue over the pleasant coffeeroll.

I'm not up to speed concerning the standardisation effort. Still, template colour is allright right now:

• Coffeeroll; feels positive, indicates flattery.
• Pink/red; feels hostile, indicates disputes.
• Blue hue; feels gentle, indicates organisation or a organisational problem.

-- Ec5618 13:11, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, according to Wikipedia:Template messages/Disputes, this is a talk page template. and it makes sense, I suppose, the article itself should not contain these notes, as the 'cleanup' message was indended to motivate editors, not readers.

Still, the template seems to have slowly evolved into an 'article template', and I propose we allow it to remain so. Not in the least because it would involve a lot of mindless effort (a bot could be programmed to move the template to the talk page), but because it could be argued that a reader should be informed that the article he/she is reading is not (yet) up to par.

Perhaps we should call a vote/initiate discussion, but I'm sure there are more suitable fora than this talk page, which is reserved for layout/text discussion.

-- Ec5618 13:29, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry - you are right, I was looking at Wikipedia:Template messages/Disputes rather than Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup. I have no particular axe to grind re colours, which is why I didn't revert you :) Perhaps Wikipedia talk:Template messages/Disputes or Wikipedia talk:Template messages/Cleanup would be a better place to discuss? I understand that User:violetriga will be oragnising an effort to tidy up the other templates soon, so you may want to watch WP:TS. -- ALoan (Talk) 14:02, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

If the message does actually belong on the talk page, shouldn't the message itself not refer to "this article's talk page"? I prefer it on the article itself. As well as being a motivator to editors, it's an acknowledgement that the article does not represent the standard to which Wikipedia holds itself; I'd feel better as a reader seeing a subpar article with a cleanup tag and knowing that someone will be working on it to make it better than to think that's the standard for Wikipedia. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 16:18, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Screen resolution issues

At the moment this template looks rubbish. It needs widening so that each sentence is on a single line and there are no hanging centred words. Arcturus 22:05, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

You edited it last, it's your fault. It looked fine before, on my resolution. What exactly is the problem? Reverting for now. -- Ec5618 22:31, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

No, as it now stands, after your revert, it looks stupid. On anything other than the smallest resolution one or two words of each sentence are orphaned in the centre of a second line. I widened the whole structure to correct this. Arcturus 22:50, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to ignore your tone, and try to help. This is the current template:

It looks alright on my screen: both lines even have a centimetre of space left of both sizes. You're saying it looks 'stupid'. How's this:

Does that fix the first line? Even the second one, perhaps?

Does that fix the first line? Even the second one, perhaps?

Finally:

This is the template with a rediculously small fontsize (people will not accept it in a template). It leaves over 4 centimetres of space on either side of text. Please elaborate. -- Ec5618 00:00, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Quote "You edited it last, it's your fault. It looked fine before, on my resolution." I'm going to ignore your tone as well. In fact I'm going to ignore this whole issue, apart from to remark on your comment that it's alright on YOUR resolution - what about other users? I'm very happy for you to sort out trivia such as this, I'm moving on to more important topics. Please bear in mind that different users use different skins and different resolutions - so sort out something that fits all. How about not using text centre aligned or something? Thanks, Arcturus 16:36, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Quite right. A apologise if my tone suggested to you that I was not trying to help. I was. You did not let me help you.

You are the first person to suggest the template is not ideal under some resolutions. But you failed to provide information on your resolution, and ignored my request for more information. Please, do 'move on to more important topics'. -- Ec5618 17:15, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Lets be nicer, everyone's just trying to help :) I've tested it out, and Arcturus' concern does have merit (so I do thank him for brining it to our attention). He appears to have been using a resolution of 800x600, used by a reasonable amount of people. The cleanup notice does take on a less-than-perfect appearance under it. I've provided a fixed-width replication of what it looks like directly below. If you'd like to see for yourself, you may resize your browser window to an 800 width (or just lessen its width gradually until the word "quality" wraps.

It should be noted that people do not always navigate on full screen, some have their history bar open, and, in the case of those who have difficulty reading, some may have increased their text size. We should do our best to accomodate resolutions starting at around 600 (maybe less for mobile devices?), and of course we should take note of text, and how it wraps. I've also taken a screenshot of the template with the text increased (you may do this yourself in most browsers by holding [ctrl] while spinning the mouse wheel).

There are several solutions to this problem. The first is to make the template not rely on resolution by making it fixed width. This will make it appear exactly the same width, no matter what resolution you're running at. (Example directly below paragraph.) The problem with this is that for the users that are set to a very small resolution (and/or have text size increased), the template moves off to the right of the screen and requires that they scroll sideways. This may be unnaceptable.

Another solution is to make the template 'full' width. I think this is reasonable, though it doesn't look ideal - there is a large amount of "blue" space to the left and right, and it's not offset by an equal amount of whitespace (in 1024 browser width, at least).

We could also add a "white-space:nowrap" property to the last several words, causing them to wrap in a reasonably "nice" manner when they do. I've adjusted the following example to reflect what it would look like under 800width. For other widths it would look exactly as it does now, until the wrap is forced.

By the time we find a user who is adversely affected by the above - well, basically, I don't think we will :) My vote goes to this one, I'll add the span tag to the current version if noone objects. I'll also be adding a couple of small changes to make the template be and look a bit more proper. As an aside, if you are interested in this sort of thing, please check out the Usability WikiProject. Thanks. –M^T 30 June 2005 07:51 (UTC)

higher?

The higher standard, kind of implies that the article has a high standard already and since we think it is really important we want it to become featured or something, but actually the article doesn't conform with some very basic requirements. Can anyone suggest some rewordings? --MarSch 12:40, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I noticed that the word "higher" was changed to "minimal" - I decided to change it back. At the time I wasn't aware that there was a discussion here about the wording. When I first read it, I thought it was vandalism - saying that an article should conform to a "minimal standard" of quality was interpreted by me as meaning that the article should not even attempt to be improved so it grows beyond the minimal standard. Howver, after I found this talk page and read the post here, I realize that the change was not ill-intentioned - sorry for my jumping to conclusions. Please feel free to replace "higher" with "minimal" for the time being if it seems better to do so.

I agree that the original wording with "higher" is not entirely adequate, but not because it implies that the article is already at a "high standard". The way the template is worded seems rather harsh and discouraging. I met people on Wikipedia who were not keen on seeing the template posted on certain pages because they felt that it would discourage newcomers to the article from editing. I'd be happy to join in a discussion here to help out and come up with a better wording for the template. Cheers! --HappyCamper 23:32, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've been doing some New Pages patrolling lately and most everything that comes in is poor quality (and quantity), but sometimes there are these longer bits which are very poor. The wording of this template made me doubt that it is intended for such, but apparantly it is and people stick them on. The problem is that the wording of this template doesn't state the problem correctly or indicate that there is a problem at all with an article; it only says that an article needs improvement. Perhaps it needs to be made clear what the purpose of this template exactly is. --MarSch 12:23, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How about this wording?

"The ideas in this article should be reorganized for clarity, flow, and coherence. You can help by incorporating guidelines and suggestions from here, here, here, and here.

I deliberately took out the word "conform" and "higher standard", and also made the template sound a bit more approachable and friendly. What are your thoughts on this? HappyCamper 14:16, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hey, that's pretty good! How about

• "This article would benefit from a thorough cleanup. You can help by incorporating guidelines and suggestions from How to edit a page, Cleanup and Style and How-to Directory. --MarSch 08:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yay! Looks like we got consensus on the second sentence. How about changing the word cleanup to revision in the first sentence? Cleanup seems too vague, whereas revision would carry the meaning of reconsideration and modification - something essential for articles that have been tagged. It also avoids duplicating the word "cleanup" in the tag too. --HappyCamper 11:43, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sure, I will implement this. --MarSch 15:13, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! Wikipedia rocks :-) HappyCamper 16:36, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I centered the text to make it more consistant with other templates Elfguy 23:12, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Elfguy! HappyCamper 23:45, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Hey, I was entirely unaware of this discussion, but I saw the new template and I think it's a good idea. Radiant_>|< 12:01, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of the discussion until I saw the change. This goes completely against the spirit of cleanup. Articles that need thorough revision don't belong here but on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention. See Wikipedia:Deletion policy and please restore the original, and correct, wording. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:12, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to revert the changes if you prefer the former wording. --HappyCamper 13:26, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Agree that it should be reverted to the last good version by HappyCamper (tried to do this but wikipedia is in a bad mood). Mirror Vax 14:37, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Maybe we should put the revised wording on the template that is actually for articles needing a lot of cleanup ;) Perhaps it would also be a good idea to name attention and cleanup in such a way, that the difference is clearer. --MarSch 17:25, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree. For now, I think it's best to leave the wording the way it is and propose a complementary template later. Check here for my idea... --HappyCamper 20:30, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Reformed incidental rant

82.92.119.11 expressed some concerns in a negative manner recently. I've reformatted them to not be so rude, and re-included them. Perhaps we can help address this issue?

9 out of 10 times people don't bother to list the article on Wikipedia:Cleanup, they just add this template onto an article and leave. It's as if they're using the template to say "I believe this article is bad" ("I've done my part!"). It's one thing to point out that an article needs wikification (this is just gruntwork, and if you don't feel like doing it it does pay off to at least flag the article), but just saying you want it cleaned up in some non-specified way without helping out yourself? Not good.

I somewhat agree, unless you want to draw attention to a particularily poor article, cleanup should probably not be used, unless you're doing some of that cleanup yourself. –M^T 30 June 2005 08:57 (UTC)

Can we do a little bit of brainstorming to figure out what sorts of "cleanup" can be done for articles? Let's try the following: we'll take a look at all the templates and tools available to editors, and see if we can come up with something that would supplement the system that's already on Wikipedia. I think what's missing is a cleanup tag which indicates the extent to which the article has to be changed, and what exactly needs to be changed. The templates could even guide the editing process. For example, a "level 1 template" could mean just fixing spelling/grammatical errors. Then "level 2" could be resectioning. "Level 3" could be a rewrite to introduce coherence. Et cetera. I also don't see a problem with people adding a cleanup tag and not cleaning up the article themselves per se - editing on Wikipedia is all voluntary, and if adding a little cleanup tag is what some Wikipedian thinks is their useful contribution, that's okay too. Sometimes, cleanup tags are added to draw the attention of those who are more familiar with a particular subject to clean up the article. Of course, kudos to the few Wikipedians who come along and actually do the cleanup. However, I think adding a cleanup tag should not be seen as an edit that is intrinsically lower quality. We don't have information to determine what exactly the impact of cleanup tags have. For the purposes of this discussion, I think we should focus on what about cleanup templates we can change. We can address this issue of "usefulness" of these tags in a different section of this talk page, as I think this latter thing is a systemic problem and not something we can easily fix. What we could do is write about the advantages/disadvantages of adding a template to an article, and let the Wikipedian decide if it is worth it to do so for a particular article. --HappyCamper 30 June 2005 13:02 (UTC)

I entirely agree that a lot of people will throw up cleanup and move along. Same goes for stubs. I'm guilty of this but don't have a problem with it because at least there is some indication at the top for visitors that the community recognizes that the article isn't up to snuff and that we need a volunteer to take the time to clean it up so it is professional enough to be included in a regular encyclopedia. My recommendation is to include a line that indicates we recognize the problem, we apologize for a poor article, and we ask for a volunteer (maybe you) to spend 5 minutes or so to clean it up.--Will2k 18:47, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

What I would like is for all participating in this discussion to do some new pages patrolling. When you feel you need gloves, tell me whether {{attention}} and {{cleanup}} are the right tools. I think not. Cleanup seems to be deprecated as well. Attention is very vague, but supposedly intended for pages needing a lot of cleanup. Personally I think we really only need one template for articles that don't conform to very basic guidelines.--MarSch 30 June 2005 13:43 (UTC)

• Let's make it a goal of phasing out the use of the existing "attention" and "cleanup" templates (and related templates) in favor of something which targets articles which do not conform to "basic guidelines". What sorts of articles are we going to target with this template? Let me try a list here...The "basic cleanup template" is used for articles which might have

1. unorganized ideas throughout the article
2. poor or excessive sectioning
3. fragmented content
4. little flow or coherence
5. copious spelling mistakes
6. copious grammatical mistakes
7. copious typographical errors
8. poor layout of diagrams and pictures
9. colloquial language, non-encyclopedic phraseology
10. incorrect word usage, extensive use of neologisms
11. highly technical content not explained adequately
12. excessively esoteric or abrasive language

--HappyCamper 30 June 2005 15:39 (UTC)

What I think is more useful is if there would be one template for each (group of) wikiproject(s), much like stubs, such that the right people are made aware that there are problems. --MarSch 30 June 2005 16:59 (UTC)

So, are you suggesting a template to make cleanup templates? --HappyCamper 30 June 2005 17:38 (UTC)

Not really, stubs don't use 'em. --MarSch 30 June 2005 18:00 (UTC)

Hmm...then I'm not sure if I understand what your suggestion is. Could you elaborate a bit further? HappyCamper 30 June 2005 22:10 (UTC)

I'm suggesting that for each stub (math-stub) there is a template to attract the attention of a specific wikiproject or so (math-cleanup). That way people interested in the article can help it. This would hopefully work better than indiscrimantely tagging articles with (cleanup-copious typographical errors). I wouldn't be interested in fixing that, unless it seems an interesting article/stub. On the other hand if a math article has serious problems I want to take a look at it. We have a list for things like this, but a category would be easier. --MarSch 1 July 2005 10:52 (UTC)

If we did this, wouldn't we have tons of cleanup tags for different types of subjects? What if we made a tag where you can pipe to a Wikiproject, or another page with the syntax {{cleanup|WikiProject X}}? That way, any WikiProject can use it. Also, if an article should be rewritten so it conforms to another "example article" then this would be the link to use. --HappyCamper 1 July 2005 14:16 (UTC)

Current version

The current version of the template doesn't stand apart from the article. This needs to be corrected, in my opinion. Should it be reverted back? --Blu Aardvark | ^{(talk) | (contribs) 10:07, 17 July 2005 (UTC)}

Clear your cache if this doesn't look right. It should look nearly identical, with a box and purple color. -- Netoholic @ 17:14, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Note that you should clear the cache for your CSS, not the template. I think. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 18:46, July 17, 2005 (UTC)