Template talk:Neighbors

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Obnoxious?

The following discussion was moved from Talk:Harry Potter#Neighbors templates?. Brian Jason Drake 03:24, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

None of the Harry Potter articles curently have them. The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows article has recently had its template removed. I can't find any documentation for these templates, nor any discussion about their removal from Harry Potter articles. The {{HPBooks}} template doesn't have "preceeded by" and "succeeded by", so why remove the nieghbors templates? Brian Jason Drake 04:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Hm. Thats odd. They should have them, shouldn't they? Disinclination 04:11, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Apostrophe (talk ยท contribs) removed them all (I assume). He/she deleted the template from Deathly Hallows saying "rm obnoxious template". John Reaves (talk) 05:36, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
How is it obnoxious? Every other book series or movie series I've seen lists this template. Disinclination 06:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
You'd have to ask Apostrophe. I say we put them back in. John Reaves (talk) 06:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
They're obnoxious because they're ugly displacements of information. What follows and precedes the book shouldn't be the first thing to read in the article. The information has been added to the HPBooks infobox. ' (Feeling chatty? ) (Edits!) 07:47, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
These templates are clearly navigation tools and not really part of the article. I think most people will find it easy enough to ignore them if they don't find them useful. Brian Jason Drake 03:24, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
This template is ridiculous (same with {{Beginbookneighbor}}, and {{Endbookneighbor}}) and should be deleted, boxes at the bottom of the article have always been used to denote the next and previous articles in a series. See the bottom of the article Margaret Thatcher for an example of how the boxes are used. +Hexagon1 (t) 06:27, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page suggests (among others) {{atn}}. I have only ever seen this template at the top of the page. That template is surely far more intrusive that the neighbours templates. Brian Jason Drake 08:18, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the information is much less obtrusive when place within the article's infobox and makes for a much cleaner look. See the new parameters at {{HPBooks}}. John Reaves (talk) 23:33, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

The neighbours templates are far less noticeable than any infobox and certainly less noticeable than the Wikipedia links on three edges of the screen (MonoBook skin, which is the default). Brian Jason Drake 08:18, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
They're horrible, and should not be the first thing in the article. When I look up something, I'm looking for the definition or the said thing, not what preceded it. Also, WP:ARCHIVE deals with talks. Since this was moved from a HP book article, we're mainly discussing it's use in the mainspace. If any user wishes to use this in his talk archives s/he's welcome to subst. +Hexagon1 (t) 08:29, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
Talk page aren't in the mainspace and therefore we don't need to worry about their aesthetics. Infoboxes are definitely far less intrusive than this template. Why have a function that could be easily included in the infobox made separate? John Reaves (talk) 08:43, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
  1. When you look at an article, the first thing you're looking for is the definition.
    Using this template doesn't make it the slightest bit harder to find that definition, in my opinion.
  2. Infoboxes are less intrusive.
    Infoboxes take up more space, and are therefore more intrusive in a certain sense. As long as we're careful about the formatting (which we normally are), they don't make it any harder to read the article either. However, sometimes there's a lot of them and so it's not always very easy to find what you're looking for.
  3. We don't have to worry about aesthetics on talk pages.
    Huh? Brian Jason Drake 01:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Ideally it would be hidden by default but able to be shown using a skin or by setting an option on the preferences page. I'd do it myself if I knew how. Brian Jason Drake 01:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, you do that. But realistically, infoboxes are less intrusive as we don't stuff them at the start of the article, but rather the end. It's been done in this fashion since the earliest sequential articles. When I look up something, I want the opening sentence to define it, when I open an article and the first thing I see is: Next in series: Family Guy it takes an extra second to orient myself as to the beginning of the actual article, and it's this unnecessary extra second which gets annoying after a while. +Hexagon1 (t) 08:16, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
I'll try it (I've just started working with skins myself). How would it be if we moved this templates to the right of the screen, above the infoboxes? Brian Jason Drake 04:32, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template names

What do these templates have to do with books? Can we rename {{beginbookneighbor}} and {{endbookneighbor}} to {{beginneighbor}} and {{endneighbor}} respectively? Brian Jason Drake 04:32, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I've just realised that {{beginneighbor}} and {{endneighbor}} already exist and are more general versions of {{beginbookneighbor}} and {{endbookneighbor}}. It seems like all the articles that use the "general" templates are books or trilogies and none of them use the "general" templates directly (they use the "book" templates, which in turn use the "general" templates).
The "general" templates don't have talk pages. I would prefer to get rid of the "general" templates and will do so (replacing them with the "book" templates and making the "book" templates into redirects) if noone responds. Brian Jason Drake 05:09, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Further explanation of previous post: I intend to remove the italics from the templates. You can put them in when you use the templates; that's the way I've seen other templates work. Brian Jason Drake 05:11, 18 February 2007 (UTC)