Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 May 22

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was keep Woohookitty^Woohoo! 09:28, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Template:Lifetime (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Context: Template:Lifetime through it three parameters add {{DEFAULTSORT: ZZZZ}}, [[Categegory:XXXX births]], and [[Category: YYYY deaths]].

This template complicates an otherwise simple process of adding a birth and death category and DEFAULTSORT. It impedes our ability to order categories as we see fit. It also decreases readability when editing categories on an article. Furthermore, arbitrary mass changes (31 for the minute of 17:37, 22 May 2008) sometimes improperly have created a real need for this issue to get formal attention. — gren グレン 22:19, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Wikisyntax is hard for newbies and this template make it even harder. This template may make editing easier for some experienced users, but for the rest it is just another template we have to learn for something that we could do perfectly with regular wikisyntax. I sugget that we keep the template, but have a bot a (smackbot?) go after us and subst it as we use it. That way those who are familiar with the template can keep using it. Rettetast (talk) 22:24, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I am not necessarily opposed to that but users using this template currently are not adding this where the templates didn't previously exist but removing the categories to add this template. gren グレン 22:27, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes. I see from below that you can use {{lived}} instead and then it would be better to delete " lifetime. Rettetast (talk) 22:31, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Delete The problems occurred are many. Editors can use {{Lived}} which subst and is automatically replaced by defaultsort and the categories. Having this template around gives us 2 different ways to do things and this occurs to edit wars. Some editors are replacing defaultsort with this one and some other are doing the opposite. The other way is simpler (no need to read instructions of one more template), it's more clear, better in searching. Even if I liked this template in the beginning, now I think we have to delete it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:24, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Note: Template was previously named {{BIRTH-DEATH-SORT}} and was considered for deletion on 2008 January 30. The result of that discussion was to keep. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 22:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment Well, because I am the one who nominated. The result was keep against the old lifetime. We had two templates doing the same job and we kept the least worse. It's seems now that we don't need any. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:27, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete I agree with User:Rettetast: I don't like templates that force editors to learn a specific wiki syntax that can be handled with a simpler, more intuitive process. -- Ssilvers (talk) 22:32, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete The cons outweigh the few pros for this template. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 22:52, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep This template handles missing birth years and living people categories. It is much easier to update from missing to a specific year, and it reminds editors to keep living people in the right category so they can be monitored more easily for BLP violations. Once both birth and death years are known, it seems wise to subst the template, but not before. It certainly seems unwise to delete the template. JackSchmidt (talk) 23:27, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Beyond the birth and death categories, this template also adds articles to the Living people or Birth year missing categories. Gary King (talk) 23:38, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

C This can be done by adding the correct categories as well. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:40, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I am aware of that. But it's a useful template for those who know how to use it. An article's birth and death dates are also unlikely to change often, so it won't be information in an article that will be edited a lot. Gary King (talk) 23:43, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

A guideline telling that "if both born and death categories exist, lifetime should not be used" would be sufficient? Because, we certainly need something more specific here. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:50, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Why shouldn't lifetime be used if both birth and death years are known? Lifetime works when either the birth or death year are known, or when they are both known, or when neither are known. It can be used in all circumstances. For An Angel (talk) 00:05, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Magioladitis didn't say "if both birth and death years are known", but "if both born and death categories exist". Crucial difference, since most of the usages of this template seem not to be by people who were "assisted" in adding YoB, YoD, or defaultsort by this template, but by replacing existing information in the form of explicit categories (and magic word). That's not helping anyone, as far as I can see, it's simply enforcing a personal markup preference for which there is, to say the least, a lack of any explicit consensus. Alai (talk) 14:30, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

• KEEP This template is easy to use, more functional and efficient than using defaultsort by itself. How hard is it to understand {{lifetime|birthyear|deathyear|sortkey}}? If someone doesn't know how to use it then they don't have to use it. Let those who know how it works add it to articles. Or you can put in the few seconds it takes to learn how to use it yourself. But there's no reason to delete it. For An Angel (talk) 23:56, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep {{BD|19xx|19xx|Name}} is one of the nicest things to have on wiki, has the required info in compact form. Excellent template, I can not understand why anyone would want to delete it. It "complicates" nothing, au contraire. "impedes our ability to order categories as we see fit"? I've seen articles were year of death was given before birth, or the years placed arbitrarily among professions. I expect to see birth/death by default at the very beginning of the cat list, just like in the intro, which starts with Name and Lifespan before anything else. I am among those who often replace Defsort and the two categories with the neat BD, BTW. (edits conflicts, I hate them) -- Matthead  Discuß   23:57, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep I can see no problem caused by the use or existence of this template. If an editor dislikes it so strongly, then just don't use it - it's not a requirement to use it. Andy Dingley (talk) 00:23, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete Pointless sugar for old hands, confusing for newbs. Hesperian 00:35, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Firstly, I think "subst:Lived" is easier. Secondly, even if we keep it, we certainly have to make more specific guidelines. Is replacement of defaultsort+2 cats with lifetime a nice edit? Do you accept that? Because, I usually do the opposite. I replace lifetime with ds to help new editors. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:35, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

  One option would be to have a bot substitute this template (maybe only when birth and death years are entered). I would be fine with this, since the primary reason I use this template is for convenience, and as I said, the information is very unlikely to change. Gary King (talk) 00:42, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - useful and valuable template. I only discovered this a couple of days ago, but am glad I have, as it's much simpler and quicker than adding the categories separately. True, it's not immediately obvious what it does - one way in which {{Lived}} is better - but generally this is a helpful template. Terraxos (talk) 01:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep - How many new editors add DEFAULTSORT and cats such as birth year, living etc. to articles anyway. In one template it does the work of several categories. I am not sure how much more difficult it is for newcomers anyway; I found the whole DEFAULTSORT template horribly unintuitive when I was new and lifetime appears cleaner and more intuitive to me. -- Mattinbgn\^talk 01:14, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Excellent template, eminently useful. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 01:24, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. It's useful shorthand for common stuff, especially correctly dealing with stuff that is otherwise usually omitted, like the living-people and date missing categories and their intersections. --Delirium (talk) 01:29, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• The problem is that user:Archanamiya has been on a rampage recently adding this template at the impossible rate of almost one article per second and making many mistakes along the way. Many people have left comments on his talk page explaining to him what he's doing wrong but he doesn't seem to notice them. But that doesn't mean that the template should be deleted. For An Angel (talk) 02:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

  The user has stopped. I suspect that this WP:TFD will fail, with no consensus reached. Gary King (talk) 02:42, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. I like to ensure that the articles I edit have the appropriate DEFAULTSORT and birth/death categories, but I can never remember all the various syntaxes offhand. The Lifetime template simplifies this immensely and I find it very heuristic and intuitive. Leofric1 (talk) 04:08, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete I can see the usefulness, but I think it's unnecessary and too complicated for what it does; as another editor said, the cons outweigh the pros. faithless (^speak) 05:34, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong delete. Categorising articles is an easy thing to do as a new editor and this makes it harder for people to understand as the template gives no indication as to what the numbers or anything are for, or even that it is for categorisation. This is especially true if just BD is used. All it is doing is creating a dependence on a template for something that shouldn't. Categorisation and DEFAULTSORT are easier to learn, and can be applied to ALL articles. This is biography specific and needs to be learnt in addition to the standard method and creates confusion between the two for those who do not know the difference. It is often stated that Wikipedia makes it hard to start editing articles, and this definitely does not help. mattbr 06:31, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep.This template is easy to use and very useful. New editors can still use DEFAULTSORT and birth/death categories, if they do not know who "Lifetime" works. Doma-w (talk) 08:11, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment Just for the record. The reason that triggered this discussion is a series of edits like these. Some users are misusing lifetime. Morever, the discussion should give an answer to this question: Which should we consider as "standard form". Can I go and delete defaulsort to add lifetime or the opposite? -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:31, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

  Comment to comment. That is an issue with a user, not an issue with this template. The incorrect application of LIFETIME could just as easily have been done to DEFAULTSORT, as those wonky edits all appear to be sort key mistakes. Ford MF (talk) 08:53, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

  It's not just about one user. It's also an argument for mandatory subst: since most of the articles this is used in were perfectly well categorized to begin with and have had it templatized for no ... whatever reason. gren グレン 09:03, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. If an editor has it together enough to use DEFAULTSORT, they've got it together enough to use LIFETIME. And if they don't, the introduction of new templates will cause them no harm, as they likely aren't using many templates anyway. And if an experienced editor doesn't like it, there's nothing compelling them to use it; they can continue to ignore it without consequence. I quite like it, personally. Seems marginally simpler than, and therefore superior to, {{lived}}, since you don't have to type out b=, d=, &c. Am I missing something? Ford MF (talk) 08:42, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep: This is obviously useful and a step in the right direction. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:55, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, useful and intuitive.-gadfium 08:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. A nice and useful template.--Jaellee (talk) 09:11, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Mild keep. If it is deleted, all these pages will be devoid of birth/death info. That's the only reason. The creator of the template went on a rampage enforcing his will without discussion, and ignored consensus. I never support that kind of rouge editing. -- Elaich ^talk
• Keep and improve. Ideally, templates that populate categories from input parameters should catch when the populated categories do not exist. Suggests to create two hidden categories: Category:Articles with invalid year of birth parameter in template and Category:Articles with invalid year of death parameter in template, and modify the template code (sorry for the lost line formatting due to the "nowiki" tag):

<includeonly>{{#ifeq:"{{{3|}}}"|""||{{DEFAULTSORT:{{{3}}}}} }} [[Category:{{#switch:"{{uc: {{{1|}}} }}" | "MISSING"|"" = Year of birth missing {{#switch:"{{uc:{{{2|}}}}}"|"LIVING"|""=(living people)}} | "UNKNOWN" = Year of birth unknown | #default = {{{1}}} births {{#ifexist:Category:{{{1}}} births||[[Category:Articles with invalid year of birth parameter in template]]}} }}]] [[Category:{{#switch:"{{uc: {{{2|}}} }}" | "LIVING"|"" = Living people | "MISSING" = Year of death missing | "UNKNOWN" = Year of death unknown | #default = {{{2}}} deaths {{#ifexist:Category:{{{2}}} deaths||[[Category:Articles with invalid year of death parameter in template]]}} }}]]<!--FROM 'subst:BIRTH-DEATH-SORT' VERSION 2.0 (2007.11.25)--> </includeonly>

The modified code has been briefly tested in a sandbox, and seems to work as intended. Oceanh (talk) 10:46, 23 May 2008 (UTC).

• Comment: If this template is kept, then AWB must be updated as it automatically mangles the categories when this template is used. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 11:24, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep It's useful and easy to understand. I don't see a large learning curve for newbies and several vandals have figured it out as well. As an aside, I like that it's not in all caps as opposed to DEFAULTSORT. If it's worth anything, at least it's not a pain in the ass to type out. Dismas|^(talk) 12:27, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as templatecruft: makes things harder, not easier, for new editors to understand, unnecessary for experienced editors, adds extra complications for data reusers. Its unnecessary use has already screwed up the carefully entered defaultsort info for a significant number of articles. -- The Anome (talk) 12:31, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment. As the above discussion shows, many users find it easier to use this template than to type out all the categories. Also we have a problem with drive-by-editors that see an error in an article and when he tries to update the birth year he does not understand the syntax. I understand that this template does things that {{subst:lived}} doesn't. Is it possible to subst this template so that the categories is shown in the usual manner. If not, is this possible to achieve? That way we all get what we want. Experienced editors can use a shorter template and it will be easier to understand the syntax. Rettetast (talk) 12:52, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong keep Useful template that saves time and effort in entering defaultsort and year of birth/death categories. Also it helps populate articles with the birth/death categories (one of more of which can easily be missed without it). Jogurney (talk) 13:21, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong keep Highly useful, easy-to-use template. Getting around the DEFAULTSORT is easy enough if you need it to be done. I see no reason to jettison it for all the good it does. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:09, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, this template does the job better than birth and death categories, especially in the case of year of birth missing. Don't see the problem with understanding its syntax. Punkmorten (talk) 14:21, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep An elegant improvement on the cumbersome birth/death category scheme. I don't think this is difficult to pick up at all; sandwiched between non-breaking spaces and dashes, citation templates for sources, infoboxes, persondata, and seas of cleanup tags, this makes life easier for new people. Chubbles (talk) 15:20, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, this template simplifies an otherwise tedious process of adding a birth and death category and DEFAULTSORT (to take the words out of the mouth of the nominator). This template saves a lot of time and not least hassle when creating biography articles, and is an inevitable tool for biography article creators. If mass changes or vandalism is a problem, instead consider protecting it than nominating it for deletion. Arsenikk ^(talk) 18:17, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, as per User:Arsenikk. Paul B (talk) 19:21, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, it doesn't have to be used so the argument that it's confusing for newbies is irrelevant (otherwise there would be no wiki templates!!) but it is very useful, labour saving template which combines several functions in one and ensures category order is consistent. Thaf (talk) 19:43, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment I think we have to start a discussion in template's talk page based in two questions: a. Should we add in the intructions: "If Category:xxxx births, Category:xxxx deaths exist, lifetime must not be used" ? and b. D you agree with the improvements proposed by Oceanh? -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:48, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong keep. I love this template and use it all the time. And yes, I do remove the three separate lines and put this template in their place (never subst'ed) when I'm editing, as it makes the categories listing much easier to read and understand. If anything, I'd suggest it be made into policy to always use {{Lifetime}}. It tremendously helps categorization of biographies, and by it being required that it go before the other categories, it also helps standardizing where the birth, death, living etc. ones appear in the final rendered list, causing Wikipedia to become more consistent for readers. -- alexgieg (talk) 19:50, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Delete - Overly complex for some users. Too easy to mix up the dates. Alternatives exist. Scanlan (talk) 20:52, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete - or maybe make people subst: it... I think we should make things as simple as they can be, but not simpler. I don't see how this is an advantage to DEFAULTSORT and the birth/death cats: there is no improvement. As per mattbr, it is confusing for newbies in the fact when they are learning wiki syntax, seeing this and DEFAULTSORT mixed up will confuse people, and some won't realise the birth/death cats exist because they aren't explicit in the editing page. If people find it easier to type out, then there is no reason why it shouldn't be subst'd (by a regular run of a bot, say). Severo^TC 21:03, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete – Seems way too confusing to me. Jared Preston (talk) 21:28, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete, or make it "must-subst", per Severo. Having both forms around is clearly going to unnecessarily complicate matters, and forcing to standardisation on the template is just busy-work, and introducing a completely pointless single-point-of-failure. Alai (talk) 21:53, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment. I think that this may be kept if subst'ing is required. Some users seem to find it useful but most use the DEFAULTSORT and cats on their own and their inclusion on articles should be obvious and clear not hidden within this template. DoubleBlue (Talk) 21:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. After testing out the use of this template, I see that subst'ing it is even worse than leaving the template. The categories and defaultsort should be in plaintext in the edit window not hidden in a template. DoubleBlue (Talk) 11:46, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment I prefer the DEFAULTSORT it is far less complicated. The option of using it should be continue. Thank you RFD (talk) 00:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete complicated and completely unnecessary. At least do not convert existing articles that properly use defaultsort, and birth/death category - unnecessary waste of time & resources. Renata (talk) 00:15, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep and Improve - it simplifies things. Ian Cairns (talk) 00:18, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. It works & people use it. I prefer for articles to have the raw code, as it helps learning, but people should be able to use this as a shortcut and have a bot replace it with the raw code. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 04:44, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

  Yes, substituting it makes a lot of sense. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 07:25, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - I'm struggling to see it being confusing to a new editor, or more specifically a new editor that was able and willing to put the brainpower to understand the Category and DEFAULTSORT features. It's one of the more intuitive templates in its naming and parameters.
• Keep As Per above arguments. - -[The Spooky One] | ^{[t c r]} 06:02, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Make susbst-only. Yes, experienced Wikipedians may not realise it, but every template makes editing more confusing for newcomers, and newcomers are traditionally treated very gently here. If this template saves a couple keystrokes, substing it makes some sense, but keepingh it in article text forever is tempaltecruft and fails Occam's razor. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 07:25, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment. I see many people here commenting how supposedly confusing this template is to newcomers. How come? I was a newcomer until a few weeks ago, and at the very first instant I saw this template, what I think happened at my second day editing, I understood its purpose. Really, it makes no sense to think that people willing to edit encyclopedia articles, of all things (for anything but vandalism, of course), are that much brain-dead. Don't you guys be so patronizing. If syntactic sugar has a place at all, it's here. Whatever makes editing easier is welcome. -- alexgieg (talk) 13:21, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Comment thats all the more reason to delete then -
      • Comment. All templates are syntactic sugar. No exception. Infoboxes? Can be done with wikisyntax. Let's delete them. Ditto for user boxes, message boxes, sortable lists, multi-column templates etc. So, no, it's not "all the more reason to delete then", unless you can provide the "more reason to not delete" the others. Templates are all about replacing repetitive tasks. Categorizing is a repetitive task. Ergo, categorizing templates are legit. -- alexgieg (talk) 14:25, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
      • Comment #2: By the way: wikisyntax itself is nothing more than syntatic sugar for HTML tags. What's the advantage of [[Image:Bla.jpg|Description]] over <div style="float: right;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bla.jpg"><img src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bla.jpg" alt="Description"/></a><br/>Description</div>? None. So, let's do away with it and only keep wikitags that do something to the wiki software itself, such as meta-categorization. After all, there are much more people out there with HTML knowledge than with wikisyntax knowledge. Wikipedia is certainly confusing to them. ;-) -- alexgieg (talk) 14:39, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete or force-subst. - Templates should not be a substitute for wiki syntax. If a user can grok what {{Lifetime}} does, he/she will also be able to use DEFAULTSORT. Note also that certain editors are going around replacing defaultsort+yob/yod with {{lived}}. -- Fullstop (talk) 14:12, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
  ps: A subst: version apparently exists as {{Lived}}.
• Keep - It encourages the addition of categories indicating what you don't know (Category:Year of birth missing (living people), etc) as well as what you do, which aids in cleanup -- KathrynLybarger (talk) 14:19, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. This template greatly simplifies the task of adding and maintaining sorting information, birth year, and death year categories for experienced editors who know to use it. A forced-subst version would be only marginally more annoying to add but would make the data harder to maintain. Additionally, it makes it more obvious when the birth and death information are missing. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:35, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep - the instructions are good and can be found by going to the template page under the edit box as with any template, or it can be learned (as I for one do many things here) by comparison with its use on other pages; it does seem to (inclusively) put several ideas into one (for biography pages; Defaultsort remains when it is relevant for some other pages.) Schissel | Sound the Note! 19:10, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete The simplicity is the best. It is already perfectly simple enough to add birth and death categories and default sort, and the template doesn't simplifies the process much; it only adds more (if not much) complication. -- Taku (talk) 21:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
• Very strong keep The related categories may be needed. Kitty53 (talk) 06:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Very strong keep It simplifies the process. Maybe it needs explanation like lifetime|b=XXXX|d=YYYY|sort=KEY. --Yuriy Lapitskiy ~ 07:22, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete. Gains very little and just adds more confusion for newbies. Moondyne 13:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Template is easy to use and very useful. Allows for variations and is not mandatory. -- Alexf⁴² 15:59, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. Template is very instrumental in precise understanding of historical dates. Those who are busy with deletion instead of going forward and create, are only preventing the development of Wikipedia. -- Shoteh (talk) 16:38, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep With guidelines indicating that use of this template is not mandatory. People who find it easier to do longhand can and should; those who do not will have the shortcut. And those who insist on abusing this Template because of anal-retentiveness or editcountitis should be bitch-slapped by admins the same as those who abuse anything else. As for confusing the n00bs, they are confused regardless; we should no more dumb down all our processes to fit their limited abilities than we should limit our content to that which is fit for children. Advanced templates (such as the entire citation series) exist to assist advanced editors, whose responsibilities broadly include cleaning up after those with less experience. Thus, this does not, and should not, replace the existing functionality, but rather simplify the process of implementing it for those who know how to do so. --KGF0 ( T | C ) 17:12, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. Intuitive, elegant, useful, instantly understandable. --Lockley (talk) 17:53, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. This is very useful and keeps the categories organized. Chantessy (talk) 17:56, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Neutral, but force subst: of this template and stop users from adding this when all of these parameters are already present. gren グレン 19:56, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep I can't help feeling partially responsible for bringing this to light as I've added this template to a couple of hundred pages in the last few days. To the contrary of the claim that it complicates things, I think it simplifies them. It turns 3 lines into one, thus reducing clutter on a page.--Dr who1975 (talk) 04:16, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
  • You're clearly not mainly responsible in "volume" terms, but edits that "add" the template without actually adding anything to the article are indeed precisely the problem here. You prefer the version that "decreases the complexity" as measured in number of lines of wiki syntax. Others prefer the version that "decreases the complexity" by not having several distinct flavours of markup in use for exactly the same effect. Thus the potential for an infinite loop of self-definedly "good" edits, that go absolutely nowhere. If this template is kept, it forces us to decide on a "preferred" form, otherwise this goes on indefinitely. Alai (talk) 13:32, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Yes... I've looked at some of the history now and I see that the person responsible was soembody who did not use the sort key correctly. Instead of simply coreecting the user, other wikipedians put an athorative "please stop without concensus" message on his discussion page and reverted all his changes instead of simply fixing his errant sort keys. Ironically, they were largely acting without concesus as this template has actually already survived a deletion review once. It occurs to me that a user could make the same exact mistake with the DEFAULTSORT template that was made with the lifetime template.... therefore... this concern is unwarranted as we already have this problem with DEFAULTSORT and we deal with it on a daily basis.
    • As for the "simplicity is in the eye of the beholder" issue. We're just arguing syntax. The old dogs who are used to using DEFAULTSORT don;t want tolearn the new tricks. However, this is wikipedia, chnage is possible... nothing should be set in stone. The actual differences between the Lifetime template and it;s predecessors are minimal. Lifetime just makes things simpler.--Dr who1975 (talk) 20:06, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
      • "Old dogs"? I hate to think what that makes me, since I'm still thinking in terms of DS being a new-fangled feature... We're indeed arguing syntax, except that I've provided an argument, and you've provided an assertion. There's nothing fundamentally better or worse about one or the other. But since my pointing out the possible different perceptions is being construed as shamelessly wishy-washy relativism, let me more explicit: if we have {{lifetime}}, we still have to have DS as well. Hence, some articles have become shorter, which might look like "simplicity" to people who only ever look at bios, and those bios with that template already in place, but the descriptive complexity of the system as a whole has quite patently gone up. Furthermore, if you're arguing for the systematic replacement of DS on bios with lifetime, and that doing so needn't wait on explicit consensus to do so, then you're pretty much guaranteeing another round of the needless drama that got us here in the first place. That someone could make the same mistake witn DS is neither here nor there: they're not making these mistakes at present, they're not making (what are quite clearly) automated buggy conversions that are susceptible to producing same, and indeed there's no need or likelihood to make them.
      • I'm a little boggled that you could imagine that somehow the fault's not with Archanamiya, but with those that cleaned up after the mess he made. Running an unapproved bot would be a Bad Thing. That it's buggy would be another Bad Thing. That it was making edits that would be at best a toss-up as to whether they were even marginally "good edits", if made on a small scale by a human editors, on a preposterously large scale, is, if not inherently bad, pushing the marginal way past any likely endurance on the part of the community. Given all this, it's hardly reasonable to expect that people pick through these edits, and carefully preserve those that were merely contentious and useless, and revert or fix only those that were that were out and out instances of the bug. Alai (talk) 02:06, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment - care should be taken with using sort key magic words inside templates. The way DEFAULTSORT works, it is the last appearance of DEFAULTSORT on a page that is used as the default sort key. For this reason alone, all uses of DEFAULTSORT should be plaintext and at (or near) the bottom of the wiki-text editing window, otherwise it can be a real pain to try and find the template that is causing a certain sorting behaviour. It is also surprisingly easy for uses of other sort key magic words (such as PAGENAME) to unwittingly over-ride the DEFAULTSORT. Most of these problems only appear when you use these magic words on talk page templates (eg. the many WikiProject banners start to conflict with different sort keys), but unless things are kept simple, there is a danger of this happening with articles as well. In addition, the entire sort key additions and data-aggregation for biographical articles needs to be designed from the top-down, not the bottom up. Wikipedia:Persondata and the discussions at Template talk:WPBiography. In particular, read this and this. I would like to quote what User:Stemonitis said there: "DEFAULTSORT should be visible to any editor without trawling through convoluted template code. Templates may over-ride the default sort key for their own categories (via a listas parameter for instance), but should not use DEFAULTSORT for that. DEFAULTSORT must only be called once on any given page, and the best way to ensure that is to have no templates calling it. Ever." It may be necessary to (again) trawl through the template namespace and make sure that DEFAULTSORT is not being used inside templates. DEFAULTSORT needs to be kept visible. Carcharoth (talk) 16:15, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

A lot of this is just the concensusof the moment. If concensus changed toward using the lifetime template on biographical pages then it would beunderstood by wikipedians in general that Defaultsort is no longer needed. The wikipedia community should not be afraid to adopt Bold guideline changes.--Dr who1975 (talk) 20:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

No, it would not, since quite clearly defaultsort is used on more than just bios, so if this exists it's always going to be an additional layer of syntax, not a replacement. Let's indeed try to "be in the moment", since speculating about possible future, different consensus gets us nowhere. I'm not sure how "be bold" helps us here, other than in the most hand-waving of all possible senses. Alai (talk) 01:39, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT is not just used in biographical articles, though that is its primary use. DEFAULTSORT is what it says it is - a general sort key to be used by default to avoid repeating sort keys many times over different categories. Getting back to the biographical articles, in my view, all biographical articles should have DEFAULTSORT even those that seem not to need it, as otherwise there is no way to distinguish between those articles that supposedly don't need DEFAULTSORT and those where no-one has checked yet whether it is needed. Leaving the DEFAULTSORT parameter of this template blank might be acceptable, as at least this indicates someone has thought about whether defaultsort is needed, but maybe not. Also, no-one has yet addressed my concern that it is bad practice to hide sort keys inside a template. Sort keys should be visible and not searched for inside a template. Here is a simple question: can anyone detect all the uses of DEFAULTSORT in Wikipedia at the moment? Can anyone provide a list of all the templates using DEFAULTSORT, and can they guarantee that no two templates using DEFAULTSORT will be used on the same page? If a developer could fix things so that an error message appeared if more than one DEFAULTSORT appeared on a page, then fine, but until that happens, DEFAULTSORT needs to be used once only, and transparently and visibly at the bottom of the page it applies to, and not in a template. Carcharoth (talk) 07:45, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Subst and delete - per my above comments. I'm also notifying User:Stemonitis and User:SMcCandlish, as their participation in the earlier discussion I pointed out means they should (theoretically) be interested in this one. Carcharoth (talk) 16:19, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete or force-subst -- needlessly complicated. Replacing exsisting cats with this is even more useless. Allowing it to stay as a forced subst: would actually be the best of both worlds as it wouldn't hide what it's doing, and would still allow those who find this convinient to keep using it --T-rex 17:43, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep - This is a simple and elegant template that saves having to put in separate categories for birth and death, together with the default sort template. DEFAULTSORT is needed most often in biographic articles, and Lifetime conveniently eliminate the need for it. Once regular editors of biographies have found how to use it there should be no problem. Peterkingiron (talk) 20:08, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
• A subst template like this that serves no convenient purpose other than to confuse should be deleted. I don't see why the categories shouldn't be added manually, since it's actually easier to do so than to establish this template to do it for us. Valtoras (talk) 05:07, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

It's not a subst template; and I now add this a dozen times a day, saving a noticeable amount of time. Apart from that, I agree ... Charles Matthews (talk)

Would you be happy using it as a subst. template? As an aside, I see on Stephan Szántó, that you put the sort key as "Szántó, Stephan", when it should be "Szanto, Stephan". See Wikipedia:Categorisation#Other specifics:

"Letters with accents or diacritics should generally be avoided in sort keys, because they are sorted incorrectly by the Mediawiki software. For example, the software sorts "á" after "z", which is not correct in any language. For this reason, articles with accented characters in the title will almost certainly require an explicit sort key instead of relying on the default "sort by article title" behavior. For example, the article about the Hungarian town of Ács uses Acs as its sort key. Remember that sort keys are not displayed, so the article title will still show up with the correct spelling in the category page."

And Wikipedia:Categorization of people#Ordering names in a category:

"Punctuation, such as apostrophes and colons (but not hyphens) should be removed, and accented letters and ligatures should be replaced by their unaccented or separated counterparts. The first letter of each word should be in upper case, and all subsequent letters should be in lower case, regardless of the correct spelling of the name. Thus, Lena D'Água sorts as. For a surname which begins with Mc or Mac, the category sort key should always be typed as Mac with the remainder of the name in lowercase — for example, Macdonald, Maccluskey or Macmorris — regardless of how the surname is actually spelled. Remember that the sort key only affects where an article is listed in alphabetical order — it does not alter the appearance of the title. Without these last alterations, all punctuation marks and internal capital letters would be sorted before A, and all accented characters and ligatures would sort after Z."

Many people fail to do this despite it being marked clearly in the guidelines, and I forget as well sometimes, so forgive me for repeating it at length here, especially as when, as here, it is the third character in that is accented, as that means in practice there is little need to remove the diacritics. Carcharoth (talk) 07:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

This is terrible! It's a serious, serious, serious bug in MediaWiki! For God's sake, how in the nine circles of hell can a software, supposedly Unicode and UTF-8 compliant (and if it isn't it should be), in the middle of year 2008, still sort characters by their internal binary representations rather by their semantic meaning? This isn't the DOS era! Policy or not, I won't follow this guideline. MediaWiki must be brought up to the way people use the alphabet, not the other way around.

If this behavior of mine for some reason isn't "acceptable", then someone please write a bot to go around correcting these entries, because the above instructions are perfectly "automatizable". If MediaWiki doesn't do internally what it should, nor do most people follow them, let a piece of software take care of it, as Unicode semantic tables are easy to come by. It's just not an editor's problem that the internal sorting feature was implemented in such a brain-dead way. alexgieg (talk) 12:10, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Their "semantic meaning"? That being what? Unicode support is exactly the problem: it defines one order (the one you consider to be "buggy"), different languages define the correct order for their own purposes, in some instances inconsistently with Unicode, and/or with each other. And introduce sorting rules for digraphs, etc. See the article collating sequence for the grubby details. For automatic handling of this, you'd need a language-based switch on each article, to be able to sort two [X]ish language articles according to the rules of [X]ish -- then you'd still be no further forward to as to how to sort an article in [X]ish with one in [Y]ian. Unless you used the Unicode ordering as a fallback, say. Alai (talk) 13:25, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah. What Alai said. I did once ask for a bot to help fix this so people didn't have to bother, but not much happened. See here. I think the problem might have been: I'm going to start on the dictionary of special characters and what their replacements are". But this is getting off-topic. The point is that sort keys need to be visible, not hidden away in templates. Could someone explain to me how putting sort keys inside a template makes them more visible? Carcharoth (talk) 13:58, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

@Alai, what's requested from editors is that they collapse characters such as "áàãâä" into the ASCII equivalent "a". This is much simpler than defining in which sequence the five characters (plus "a" itself) should go, and is fairly generic. Sure, there will be some languages in which it gets more complicated than that, but then, Wikipedia should bother only editors writing articles with titles in those languages to hand-craft the sort key. It's pretty out of hand to require this from every non-English editor when only a handful of them should actually have to mind these matters.

@Carchoth, when one writes {{Lifetime|year|year|sortkey}} in a page, the sortkey isn't hidden, it's pretty visible in the page itself. It just isn't preceded by {{DEFAULTSORT:, it's preceded by {{Lifetime|year|year|. -- alexgieg (talk) 14:11, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Comment Please stop nonconstructive edits by replacing the three lines with lifetime. At least until we reach a consensus. Really please. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:19, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

@alexgieg, there is nothing in the wiki-syntax indicating that the parameter "sortkey" is a sort key. Where DEFAULTSORT appears, people can instantly see that this is a sortkey. When a piped sort key is there, people who know what a piped sort key is can see that it is the sort key. Someone spotting an incorrect sort and going to an article might not know that the sort key is in this template. Or any other template. DEFAULTSORT is used in more than just biographical articles. Have a look at this search if you don't believe me, and then assure me that of those templates that are (a) used in mainspace (many are used on talk pages) and (b) that use DEFAULTSORT, none of them clash. This is what I am talking about when I'm saying people need to keep sortkeys visible - not just what the sortkey is, but that there is a sortkey there at all. Carcharoth (talk) 14:38, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

The wikiproject biography talk page template uses the "listas" parameter for a sortkey, yet we still have quite a few talk pages with a DEFAULTSORT listed after all the project templates to make sure it works right. Granted {{lifetime}} will likely be the last template on the page given the current structure of wiki pages, but it's still less obvious than just having the DEFAULTSORT keyword directly in the wikitext. Gimmetrow 20:44, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

• Further comment - quoting from the template documentation: "The template's name and its aliases are in all-caps and feature the suffix -SORT so as to clue in editors that it embeds and replaces DEFAULTSORT. (The original alias "BD" was renamed and is unlisted for the same reason.)" - unfortunately, it was renamed without someone reading the manual. We also see

  "the embedded magic word DEFAULTSORT also applies to all categories listed below the template"

  It would be better to quote from the manual at Help:Category#Default sort key:

  "In the case of multiple default sort key tags, the last one on a page applies for all categories, regardless of the position of the category tags. This also means that a DEFAULTSORT tag in a template, intended for category tags in that template, for categorization of pages calling the template, is not effective if another DEFAULTSORT tag occurs later on these pages, even if it is also "hidden", in another template."

  This is why I keep saying DEFAULTSORT shouldn't be used inside templates. Carcharoth (talk) 14:48, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Much further extra-additional comment :-) - Replying to this and to your previous reply to me: do you notice that this argument of yours would also call for the elimination of |listas= parameter from WP's talk page banners? After all, talk page categories are categories much like any other and, and if we want a DEFAULTSORT for them, it should be explicited. -- alexgieg (talk) 14:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Absolutely. Listas was a cludgy workaround to enable tracking the use of DEFAULTSORT. I'm aware that Template:DEFAULTSORT and this template (and the similar ones) are a way to track defaultsort, but I think I recently spotted a thing where the developers showed that they can clearly generate a list of all the uses of a magic word. If they could do that for DEFAULTSORT, then I would be the first to say that listas can go. Until then, the sequence is still: (1) Use a bot to match up DEFAULTSORT and listas on article and talk pages; (2) Use Category:Biography articles without listas parameter to fill in the rest; repeat cycle until all biography articles have correct DEFAULTSORT. Look at User:Polbot/ideas/defaultsort and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3 and User talk:Carcharoth/Polbot3 trial run for an old and stalled attempt to approach this systematically. This should be done now, while the number of bios is still only about half a million. It will get worse later on. Carcharoth (talk) 15:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Ouch - Lol, I'm beginning to think I'd accept a bot that went around replacing:

{{Lifetime|year|year|sortkey}}

with

{{DEFAULTSORT:sortkey}}

{{Lifetime|year|year}}

as most of the criticisms seem to be targeted towards the sortkey. This would keep us "lifetime typers" happy for the simplicity, you DEFAULTSORT fans for getting it split away from the template, and the option open for lifetime (without sortkey bot-splited from it) maybe officialized as the preferred way to semi-automatically take care of birth and death categories in biographies (what would require a whole new discussion, of course). -- alexgieg (talk) 15:37, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd certainly support separating out the DEFAULTSORT stuff and keeping it separate. Carcharoth (talk) 16:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I also like this idea. My support for the template is more about the date handling than having the DEFAULTSORT bundled in. -- KathrynLybarger (talk) 17:21, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I would also be fine with separating out DEFAULTSORT. Other than its handling of missing birth/death years, it is just a nice short cut when cleaning up new bio articles. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:30, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't see the point in separating out defaultsort. Why don't we just do away with defaultsort altogether and go back sorting each category individually? Obviously, because that would be a step backward, just like deleting Lifetime would be. For An Angel (talk) 05:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

The point is that sort keys in general should be easy to find on a page. Unless you have actually come across strange sorting behaviour and have then spent ages trying to work out which template was causing the strange sorting behaviour, it is difficult to get across just how disruptive it can be when other editors (unintentionally) "hide" sort keys in a template like this. I could say the same about categories hidden in templates, but that battle was lost long ago. There is a reason why the templates in use on a page are listed after the edit window (this wasn't always done, but since it was done things got a lot easier). Maybe the same should happen with categories, with categories appearing in a template marked as such - or rather, going general here, the behaviour produced by each template should be listed next to the template in the handy list under the edit window. ie. Template X contains Category A and Category B (with piped sort keys S and T), and also calls the DEFAULTSORT (value P) and PAGENAME magic words, and also contains Template W (which would be listed elsewhere in the template list anyway, but it would still be good to have each template list where it comes from). ie. The entry for Template W would say "transcluded from Template X". If the template behaviour was fully explicated below the edit window, many of my objections would disappear. But until that happens, complicated stuff needs to be done with care. Is anyone here willing to file a Bugzilla to ask for more template information to be displayed below the edit window? Carcharoth (talk) 07:44, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I've asked at WP:VPT about more explicit template information below the edit window. Carcharoth (talk) 07:47, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Note left here. Carcharoth (talk) 08:02, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow, I didn't understand anything you said, but even to me, it was pretty obvious the first time I saw the Lifetime template that the last field was the sort key. Is this a specific problem that people have been having with the Lifetime template? If so then would just renaming the template to "Lifetimesort" make it anymore obvious? For An Angel (talk) 15:06, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep I'm disambiguating [[conductor]] today. I was alerted to this discussion, because several articles on musicians have {{BD}} which redicrects to {{Lifetime}}. The template is serving its purpose by putting people into birth and death year categories. Is someone proposing to run a bot to fix all these articles before removing the template? Even then, what about editors who know how to use this template, who would otherwise not put people in the appropriate categories. I fail to see any purpose served by removing a useful template.  Randall Bart   Talk  17:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
  • All uses of the template would be substituted before any deletion - no information would be lost. This is mostly an argument over when it is appropriate to use templates. In my case whether it is appropriate to use powerful default sort keys inside a template (and in some cases whether sort keys are ever useful inside templates), and in other people's cases whether template use sets up a barrier for editing to new editors. I think the subst'ing for BD and the separating out of DEFAULTSORT, addresses most concerns. TfD is being used mainly as a way to attract attention to the debate (I think). I presume, from the BD name, that it was originally designed without DEFAULTSORT? Carcharoth (talk) 17:51, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

BD is just another attempt to simplify the BIRTH-DEATH-SORT. In the beginning was BD-SORT and BD followed. I like the idea of a lifetime without defaultsort if we still give clear instructions that replacing cats with lifetime should be avoided. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Okay, let's suppose we go about keeping the template, with the ability of sortkeying, but with the implicit knowledge that a bot will be running through articles and splitting out the sort-key from the template (but keeping the template itself). Well, this opens a nice possibility: we could change the template so that if a sortkey is present, the article is added to a hidden category, say, "Category:Lifetime articles with sortkey parameter". This way the bot would know at first sight where to look, and these splits would happen almost instantly. What do you think? -- alexgieg (talk) 18:47, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
  • That might be a something of an improvement over the status quo, but it's yet a fourth option, in the context of a discussion that's already distinctly fragmented (single transferable vote, anyone), and it's not clear to me why it's preferable to substing lifetime entirely. I can see the argument that it's convenient to be able to add the required information in that form, but I'm really not following why it's any sort of win to keep it in that form (much less to mass-convert existing usages of the categories into this form). And this halfway house would, in the worst case, mean we have three different ways of writing the same thing, which editors could then twiddle between all day, according to their personal preference (unless which also achieve resolution of which of them is to be considered "preferred"). Alai (talk) 01:35, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

• Comment A must-subst template that is backwards compatible with {{lived}} and {{Lifetime}} is available at User:JackSchmidt/Lived. It is currently "defanged" so that it just links the categories and mentions DEFAULTSORT in plain text, but it is easy to "refang" it. I was thinking of putting a fanged version at {{Sbds}} for subst-birth-death-sort. It allows the parameters to be named (b,d,s or b,d,key), it handles living persons, unknown/missing birth/death years, and even allows b=skip or d=skip to update only one of the categories. Ideally it would gracefully handle not being subst'd, but that is still a work in progress. JackSchmidt (talk) 19:40, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - Seems useful. Cardsplayer4life (talk) 21:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete - It may simplify use of other the DEFAULSORT, births, and deaths, but it will make it more difficult for new users to do biographies of people. Chris (talk) 02:40, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep - There are at least four pros. 1. Convenience. BD is/was even faster, but more cryptic. 2. A lower likelihood of typos resulting in sorting on the page's name (DEFAULTSORT's capitalization begs for typos). 3). Novel bio editors who copy the style from a page using 'Lifetime' won't be able to omit the birth/death/Living people categories. 4). Birth and death will appear first in the list of categories, making their absence immediately obvious, which is especially relevant for the living people category. Breaking off the default sorting will eliminate this last benefit. The only valid con I've seen raised so far is the esteemed Carcharoth's concern about it obscurely overwriting a DEFAULTSORT earlier in the text. The suggestion for a rename could make sense. Perhaps "Lifetime" can be a subst, if I get the lingo right, automatically replaced by Lifetime_DEFAULTSORT, or so. However, most people will then just struggle with typing Lifetime_DEFAULTSORT. Anyhow, since Lifetime is becoming pretty much standard in bios, anyone with some experience will look for Lifetime in a bio that sorts strangely. Afasmit (talk) 22:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Much as I'd like to go point-for-point on your alleged "pros" (to say nothing of your dismissal of the numerous considerably more significant "cons"), I think I'd best confine myself to pointing out that there's very little point in substing one inobviously-coded wrapper around something there's already a considerably more "standard" way of handling (i.e., actual categories and DS), with another one with exactly the same much-objected-to properties. That's just a rename, in effect. The gist of the bulk of the "subst" suggestions is to have something that retains the "convenience" of use (i.e. for people that can't type/won't type wiki-syntax in this particular context, regardless of the continued need to use it elsewhere), but eliminates the adhoccery of it remaining around indefinitely -- much less being imposed as the "standard" for such, on some subset of articles. Alai (talk) 23:11, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep as mentioned above, the tag is pretty simple to understand. And I don't see a good reason to delete it. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 05:49, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep ditto of statements above. It is very useful and concise, easy to learn and should be on all biography articles. --EPadmirateur (talk) 13:25, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
• Remove the DEFAULTSORT, having that templated is not very intuitive and will make it hard for people to learn how to use category sort keys. Or rename to a name that shows that this template messes around with category sorting Kusma (talk) 14:23, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. One of the most useful WP templates. If it doesn't interact well with defaultsort, then find a way to fix the problem instead of getting rid of this useful tool. Gamaliel (talk) 19:26, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
  • ... you mean some way of "fixing the problem" other than the suggested ones, of deleting, substing, or refactoring out the DS element? Alai (talk) 22:58, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
    • None of those things are needed. If Lifetime doesn't interact well with defaultsort, then all that's needed to be done is to remove defaultsort from the article if it has both. That will solve all the problems. For An Angel (talk) 03:02, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep per Matthead. --Philip Stevens (talk) 21:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep I'm a relative newbie, but I'm always looking for better ways of doing things, and this is one of them -- it's elegant. GreatScott (talk) 04:34, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was Keep per WP:SNOW. nat.utoronto 10:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Template:WPCanada Navigation (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

This is an annoying little template with no real use, that's popping up everywhere weather you want it to or not. It's like a virus, and is unwanted. It's a waste of disk space. Delete — GreenJoe 13:26, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. It's a helpful navigational template. Skeezix1000 (talk) 13:29, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Weak keep It's used on less than 50 pages, so I don't understand what you mean that it's popping up everywhere. I also don't see how it's like a virus. Also, what disk space? Wikipedia is not printed on paper, and the servers aren't getting full. I honestly don't see what's so bad about the template. Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 13:31, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. It's not "popping up everywhere", and it's not a bad little gizmo. PKT (talk) 16:36, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep No good reason given for deletion. You can't just decide which project's templates are a "virus". Second point, Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance. -Royalguard11(T·R!) 17:41, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. What an odd deletion justification! I find it a useful navigation aide and it's better to keep it as a template than to have it individually placed on several WPCanada pages. Display can be suppressed by using CSS through noprint class, if it is that annoying for this user. DoubleBlue (Talk) 21:27, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Snowball keep Perfectly fine nav template serving a useful purpose. This might be just speculation on my part, but the nom seems to have something personal against WP:CANADA. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] That in itself is not a bad thing, and the nom has every right to disagree with the actions being taken, but taking this to TFD because one person doesn't like the template and won't even discuss it isn't good. -- Ned Scott 05:17, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep per WP:SNOW. Nominator generally seems to have an aversion to any kind of standardization efforts on Wikipedia, and this isn't the first time he's tried to interfere with or shut down cleanup projects that were inconsistent with his personal preferences, but I haven't seen a real reason to delete this at all. Bearcat (talk) 16:39, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
• Speedy Keep - No reason given for deletion --T-rex 17:45, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was userfy to User:GO-PCHS-NJROTC/Antivandal Barnstar. Happy‑melon 20:52, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Template:The GO-PCHS-NJROTC Antivandal Barnstar (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Apparently a school specific barnstar. Should be userfied. - ✰ALLST☆R✰ ^echo 09:22, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Userfy I don't think it's school-specific, but rather user-specific (and the user is, in turn, named after a school). I really have no clue what its purpose is, though (I was awarded one, but I have no idea what it was for). EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:19, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment From his userpage, it's Port Charlotte High School's Naval Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps. - ✰ALLST☆R✰ ^echo 16:09, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I realize the name, but in its usage (see User talk:EVula#Thank you...), it has nothing to do with the school. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:08, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
      • It ain't school specific, that's my username here (GO-PCHS-NJROTC). It's creation was inspired by the RickK Antivandal Barnstar, and the idea was the fact that at that time I had no idea who RickK was, and I assumed that was the creator of the award. I thought I'd rather give my own barnstar with my own username than someone else's, and that's where this award comes into play. Deletion? I don't think it's a good idea. Although I'd rather see it left as is, I think that it'd be better to redirect it to the RickK version than to delete it since deleting this kind of item may screw up some people's user and user talk pages, that is if consensus points to delete (and I'm hoping it doesn't). Did that settle any misunderstandings? GO-PCHS-NJROTC (talk) 21:18, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Userfication will suffice. No need to delete. seresin ( ¡? ) 22:22, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Userfy as a personal award used by its creator (see his comment above) --Enric Naval (talk) 12:31, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, what is userfication? I was just wondering. GO-PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 00:23, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

The page will be moved from the template namespace into a subpage of your userspace. seresin ( ¡? ) 00:27, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

e.g., User:GO-PCHS-NJROTC/The GO-PCHS-NJROTC Antivandal Barnstar. Or perhaps marginally more concisely, just User:GO-PCHS-NJROTC/Antivandal Barnstar. Alai (talk) 01:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Userfy per EVula --GreenJoe 00:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was delete Woohookitty^Woohoo! 09:29, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Template:Playstations (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Not used. Not needed. The project says to use {{playstationp|Scaled=yes}}. MrKIA11 (talk) 01:54, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Comment While it's not used, isn't it significantly different from {{playstationp}}? {{Playstations}} seems to imply that the article is currently being edited, similar to {{inuse}} or {{underconstruction}}. Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 13:20, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  • {{playstationp}} says the same thing: "...that they are working on it to..." The wording could always be changed if that is the only problem. MrKIA11 (talk) 14:16, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Go ahead and delete it. The project doesn't use it anymore.--Playstationdude (talk) 23:03, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete No longer used by the project + nothing that justifies marking it as historical. At most, subst it on the project page to show old banners --Enric Naval (talk) 12:33, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete per Playstationdude (who is in fact a member of the Playstations Project). GO-PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 00:42, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was delete Happy‑melon 22:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Template:Foreignchar (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Even though it's pretty logical to have an canonicalized (transliterated) redirect to an title, there is no reason to point that out at all on the article in question (unless there direct reason to point it out, i.e. if an entity has official both types used).. _→AzaToth 22:09, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Too widely used. More discussion needed. RyanGerbil10(Kick 'em in the Dishpan!) 04:49, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

• Delete. Looking at previous discussions on this subject, it is suprising that no one (so far) responded to this nomination. However, I think it is time to delete this template. As someone said in a previous discussion: The use of {{foreignchar}} in a hatnote gives unwarranted prominence to a minor point. I believe that in most cases a comment on the use of "foreign" characters is not required. And in articles for which the transliteration of the name is not obvious, common transliterations could be listed in the article lead (as in the article on Rudolf Höß). --Kildor (talk) 14:56, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
• Comment. The template {{foreignchars}} should be considered for deletion as well. --Kildor (talk) 14:56, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, RyanGerbil10(Kick 'em in the Dishpan!) 04:39, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

• Delete Case in point: Rügen. It current features this hatnote at the top, though it could just as easily put "(sometimes spelled Ruegen)" in the intro sentence. That would be a less intrusive, and far less wordy, way of displaying the same information. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. It is helpful when foreign characters are explained in standard form to those who are not familiar with them. See Voßstraße and Talk:Vossstrasse/Archive 1 to get an idea how ugly discussions can get. -- Matthead  Discuß   00:05, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Keep- very simple, extremely useful template that allows important but often forgotten categories to be easily added. If you would rather reorder the categories, add them manually and use defaultsort. J Milburn (talk) 21:07, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
  • ... what categories? Alai (talk) 18:51, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete – Although a good concept, I think there are other ways of finding a solution to this problem. I, personally, think it makes the page ugly and don't find it helpful in the slightest. A simple redirect would suffice if you were looking/searching for the article, and I think most people know to remove the diacritic if they find it "undesirable". Jared Preston (talk) 21:39, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
• Delete - alternate spellings can be added to the lead section, and redirects can be used to point other pages to the most commonly used spelling. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 11:50, May 25, 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.