Template talk:GroveOnline

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[edit] Dates

I don't know much about templates, but is there a way to link dates within the template, so that the order can be changed according to user preferences? (I know Grove says the order, but still). Makemi 21:00, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I looked through all of Wikimedia:Template, and it looks like the template mechanism is very basic: simple text replacement. It's pretty much just what you put into the template comes out the same way, so I guess not, sorry. -Sesquialtera II 21:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I think I've done it. If it seems broken somehow (or too annoying) let me know. I'll start adding it to appropriate articles. I think it's a great tool, so good job. Makemi 22:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you meant by linking dates. I'm not sure that's really necessary - normally, linked seem to be more for "what else important happened on this day", implying that the event in question was historically important - which it might be hard to make a case for the accessing of Grove Online by a writer.

If, for some reason, you accessed the site on Bach's birthday, and are using it for the Bach article, then it might be fun to link the date. But, you could do that anyways - templates will allow you to pass links to them, so you could say {{GroveOnline|Dieterich Buxtehude|Snyder, Kerala J|[[20 January]] [[2006]]}} and that would have the same effect as your template above. So, I still prefer the three-argument version to separating the day/month and year. -Sesquialtera II 16:30, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

A big reason that people link dates is that even the English Wikipedia is used internationally, and there are different standards for the order of dates (Day/Month/year, Month/year/day, etc.), and when you go into your preferences you can set how you want to see dates. This only works when the dates are linked. It's useful because then people don't go around changing date, or getting confused if the dates are in mm/dd/yy format. So I think even for references it's useful to link the dates. Makemi 22:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

For some reason it occurred to me that it wasn't necessary for us to type in the date every time for this, but instead we could put the templates for the current month/day/year within this template, and it would save a tiny bit of time and effort. The only thing is that in order for it to work correctly, the template would have to be subst'd every time, and in addition subst'ing templates doesn't seem to work within the <ref></ref> system. I'd be happy to go around fixing these up if there are no objections. The only objection I see is that it will look messier on the editing screen if all the references are written out in full, but for me I still prefer to put the current time and date within the template. Any thoughts? Mak (talk) 04:17, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I changed it. I hope you guys like it. It doesn't seem to be broken. Now you only have to fill in article title and author. Mak (talk) 22:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link

Wouldn't this template be improved by actually providing a link direct to the article, or is there some reason not to do this? David Underdown 13:42, 9 November 2007 (UTC)