User talk:ThreeOfCups

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Welcome to my talk page! I'm currently in the process of standardizing the articles for the Myers-Briggs types, and I'm adding the missing articles for the Keirsey role variants (some are currently redirects to the Myers-Briggs types). As time permits, I'll add more info to the Keirsey role variant articles, which are currently pretty sparse. Once that's done, perhaps some of the Keirsey info could be deleted from the Myers-Briggs articles. Not sure the info needs to be duplicated. Please feel free to share your ideas; I'm a big believer in collaboration and consensus. ThreeOfCups (talk) 03:45, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Finished standardizing the articles for the Myers-Briggs types and adding the missing articles for the Keirsey role variants. ThreeOfCups (talk) 22:24, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi Three of Cups, I've been watching your work, well done on standardising the MBTI pages, they were a mess and full of a lot of crap.--rakkar (talk) 15:18, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! ThreeOfCups (talk) 03:28, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Accuracy of MBTI

Does anyone know the source of the statement that the MBTI is 70% accurate according to its manual? I have a copy of the 2nd edition (1985), and it says 75%. Can someone with a copy of a newer version either confirm or refute the 70% figure?

[edit] Templates substituting for article text

I notice you've just created two templates, Template:MBTI Cognitive Functions and Template:MBTI Instrument, that you're using to insert chunks of article text into a number of MBTI-related articles. This isn't proper usage of templates according to Wikipedia's guidelines (see Wikipedia:Template namespace) for a couple of reasons; the text is hard for new editors to find and edit, the article's contents are harder to export, the history of the text is harder to find, and it results in a lot of unnecessary verbiage and duplication of content. In the case of these two templates I can suggest a couple of approaches that might work. One, you could move each of these templates into the main article space to become short articles in their own right, and then in the places where they used to be transcluded you could use the {{main}} template to provide links to them for people to follow up on the additional detail. Or two, you could subst the contents of the templates into all of the articles they're used in and allow the text to be trimmed and customized to be specific to each usage. I'm not very knowledgeable about this field so I'm not really sure which is better, but I think the easiest and most generally useful approach is the first one - if we turn these templates into articles they'll have much more scope to grow in detail without causing other pages to grow along with them. What do you think? I can handle all the technical aspects either way, I just figured I should give you a heads-up here since you created them only a matter of days ago and solicit your input. Bryan Derksen (talk) 20:23, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to disagree with you, Bryan Derksen, but according to the following, my usage of the templates is appropriate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Template#Pages_with_a_common_section

I've included instructions for accessing and editing the templates in the talk pages in each of the articles. I've spent a lot of time editing these pages to add and update the templates, so please don't delete them. I want to follow the rules and make things as easy for other editors as possible; however, when the same content is used in 16 articles, it doesn't make sense to edit the text 16 times whenever it changes.

Neither of your suggestions would be a good choice in the context of these articles. ThreeOfCups (talk) 04:21, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I think you've misinterpreted the purpose of the page you're basing that on. The page you're linking to is a copy of a help page from the "meta" wiki, which is intended to describe how MediaWiki wikis can be used but not necessarily how it should be used. The page I linked to is a style guideline for the English Wikipedia, and so is of greater priority in deciding what the contents of a page should be and how the contents should be formatted. Every time I've come across this sort of thing (article body text being transcluded via template) there's been a strong consensus to rearrange the text so that it's not being done that way any more and I suspect adding instructions to talk pages is unlikely to change that.

Note that the solution I proposed as my preferred one, making these templates into separate articles in their own right, would not require you to edit text 16 times when you wanted to change it. There would only be one single copy of each template's text, in the articles that they get turned into. So I think you're misinterpreting what my proposal was, too. Each article that currently transcludes the text of the templates would instead link to the text of the templates.

I'm willing to do all the work of changing the layout over to the style-guide-compliant version. Would you like me to create an example for you to see what it is that I'm talking about? Bryan Derksen (talk) 04:47, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Please don't make any changes to all the work I've done. I need time to think about this and come up with a solution. So far, no one who edits the articles has objected to the use of the templates. I do understand your suggestions. I don't have time right now to explain to you why they won't work for these articles. I'm perfectly willing to do the work in a manner that will be acceptable, but not today. ThreeOfCups (talk) 05:10, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, bear in mind that we all agree to allow our work to be "edited mercilessly". :) But there isn't a big rush on this, I can wait until you've got some time. Oh, and I do appreciate your contributions, and I don't think any of your work so far need be lost. This is just an issue of how it should be presented. Bryan Derksen (talk) 16:51, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be no clear consensus in the Talk pages of the Wikipedia:Template namespace that the way I'm using the templates is a violation of policy. The problem with putting the information into the main MBTI article is that I'm using the templates for introductory paragraphs, and the type-specific information that follows makes no sense without them. Within the type articles, I've added comments containing URL links to the templates, so other editors should have no trouble making changes. For now at least, this is the approach I'm going to take, for the simple reason that this works, and nothing else that's been suggested does. Perhaps a better alternative will present itself; or perhaps, once these articles are standardized and fleshed out, it will be possible to substitute the template text for the template. ThreeOfCups (talk) 15:53, 1 June 2008 (UTC)