Template talk:Pollib

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I have observed a formatting problem with this template. As can be seen in the screenshot, the letters of the text to the left appear glued to the border of the box - to my eyes, this looks kind of ugly. The problem occurs both in Firefox and Opera, it not as strikingly in Internet Explorer, where it is noticable, but still acceptable. I have tried various things with the template to get rid of this effect, but to no avail. Maybe someone with more knowledge of wiki syntax would like to look into this some time? --Thorsten1 19:27, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Problem solved. Halibutt 19:42, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Great, thanks a lot! I actually tried changing various parameters, including this one (or so I think), but it didn't work... --Thorsten1 20:21, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Template width and general appearance

Halibutt, regarding your edit of 31 May - I like the smaller, less obtrusive bullets and admit that your version is overall sleeker. However, due to the longish full names of the parties each occupying a line of their own, I feel that the template is now definitely too wide. 290 pixels are way too much, considering that all articles with this template in them will also contain the Politics of Poland box, and some people are still using screen widths of 800 pixels or less. Something needs to be done here. In my opinion, there are only two options: Either we restrict ourselves to the parties' acronmys, leaving it to the individual party articles to cite their names in full; or we break up the party names into two lines. Personally, I would go for the second option. For the time being, I'm going set the fixed width to 200 pixels. I am aware that the look can still be improved. --Thorsten1 21:42, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, generally such infoboxes are 300px wide, but I agree that this thingie could be made a little smaller. On the other hand, now that we have the "politics of Poland" template, we could as well delete this one and simply turn it into a category... Halibutt 21:25, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

First, it's good to see you returned to useful editing, even though I do feel slightly uneasy about your new Black Book, to put it mildly. I'm probably going to end up there sooner or later...

Anyway, I think that the party templates have to be less than 300px wide because they complement the "politics of Poland" template on the other side. If these boxes are too wide, the actual article text tends to get squashed between them, especially with screen widths of 800 pixels and less or when the browser window is not maximised.

I do not agree at all with your idea to replace the party templates with categories. The post-1989 Polish party landscape is constantly evolving, to put it nicely. Less nicely, it is extremely confusing, not only for non-Poles, by the way; I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were Polish politicians who do not even remember all the parties, coalitions, or electoral comittees they belonged to over the years. Some kind of Ariadne's thread is sorely needed to find a way through this labyrinth, especially as with the Sejm election drawing nearer, there is bound to be an increased interest in articles on Polish politics in Wikipedia. "Politics of Poland" includes all parties that currently have a realistic chance of entering the Sejm, but it does not show the historical dimension, which is very important in a party landscape as unstable as Poland's.

Let's assume that an uninitiated reader is wondering what the difference is between the Social Democracy of Poland and the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland; or between the Unia Wolności and the Unia Demokratyczna. The timeline templates allow for instant orientation in such cases, even if they cannot cover all related parties, account for all changes of affiliation, and inevitably ignore overlaps between the socialist/social-democratic, liberal and conservative fields. (Btw, the conservative field is the most complex of them - I'm still figuring out which parties to include and which to leave out.) Categories can be a useful extra, also for absorbing parties that are/were too small to justify a mention on a party timeline template - but they are not a good substitute. --Thorsten1 18:49, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)