Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Banner standardisation
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This page in a nutshell: It is proposed that the page titles of all WikiProject banners be standardised at "Template:WikiProject Project". This will require moving, for instance, {{WPBiography}} to {{WikiProject Biography}} and ensuring that double redirects are fixed. |
The issue of WikiProject banner standardisation was recently raised on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. It was noted that our collection of banners, as found at Category:WikiProject banners, varied widely in nomenclature, from {{WikiProject Baseball}} to {{WPBiography}} to {{AARTalk}} to {{Aids}}. This lack of standardisation presents significant problems for those editors who add project banners to new or untagged articles, and for the coders of bots and scripts which work with project banners (the advantages of such standardisation are described below). It was eventually decided that it would be a good idea to standardise the banners on one naming convention, moving any banners as necessary (such as {{Anglicanismproject}} to {{WikiProject Anglicanism}} or {{WP Bhutan}} to {{WikiProject Bhutan}}) and correcting any double redirects.
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[edit] Advantages of standardisation
[edit] Ease of tagging
Although about 60% of all Wikipedia articles are tagged with at least one project banner, there are still hundreds of thousands of articles which have not been identified as being of interest to one of Wikipedia's 1600 WikiProjects. There are a significant number of editors who perform the invaluable task of patrolling Special:Newpages and Special:Random to find untagged articles, to which they add appropriate project banners, with assessments if appropriate. These editors are usually not familiar with the unusual titles used for some project banners, and need a standardised naming convention. Upon seeing Punicalagins, for instance (found from Special:Random), it is obvious that it would be of interest to WikiProject Chemistry. However, there is currently no easy way to know how to add the appropriate banner to the talk page. Adding {{WikiProject Chemistry}} does not work, although it would be the most likely guess. The template required is actually {{Chemistry}}.
[edit] Future use of templates
A substantial minority of project banners use template names (like {{Chemistry}}, {{Aids}}, {{Beer}}, etc) which are often used for article-space navigational templates (compare {{Martial arts}}, {{Australia}}, {{Photography}}, for instance). Although moving the templates does not immediately free up these titles, it makes them more accessible (there is a psychological difference between claiming a redirect and claiming an existing template). By discouraging future WikiProjects from taking template names like these, it also reduces the likelihood of naming conflicts in the future. Of course, unless and until an alternative use for the title arises, something like {{Physics}} would remain a redirect to Template:WikiProject Physics.
[edit] Coding bots
A number of bots and scripts are used on Wikipedia to analyse and manipulate data from WikiProject banners. It would be significantly easier to code such processes if all wikiProject banners used a standardised naming convention. For instance, scripts like Mediawiki:Gadget-metadata.js or applications like Igor could be simplified, or expanded with more powerful/reliable functionality, if the banners they analyse could be relied upon to follow a standard form. Similarly, bots which automatically tag large numbers of articles could be made more resource-efficient and server-friendly; it would also make much easier the difficult programming task of working out where amongst the templates at the top of article talk pages a new banner should be placed, if the block of WikiProject banners could be easily identified.
This is of particular relevance when the analysis is done not on the live pages but on a recent database dump. Here, the full wikitext of pages is not available, but only the various data tables which link pages together. By analysing the templatelinks table, the list of templates used on a page can be found very quickly and efficiently. Hopefully the advantages of being able to rely on wikiproject banners appearing in this table with a consistent naming convention is obvious: determining whether or not a template is a project banner otherwise is time-consuming, involving analysing the categorylinks table.
A standardized naming convention for banners also simplifies the mechanisms by which automated processes connect a banner with its corresponding wikiproject. This standardisation process (described below) will require a script to analyse links on the banner page, the categories the banner is in, and other pages in those categories, and may still require human intervention to determine the correct link. If it were convention that the wikiProject could be found simply by replacing "Template:" by "Wikipedia:" in the template name, these processes would be immensely simplified and have a reduced error-rate.
[edit] Process
| Syntax | Frequency |
|---|---|
| WikiProject_ | 544 |
| WP | 148 |
| WikiProject | 51 |
| WP_ | 39 |
| Wikiproject_ | 16 |
| Wikiproject | 11 |
| Wp | 6 |
| Wp_ | 0 |
| Other | 314 |
| Total | 1129 |
The convention chosen is "Template:WikiProject Foo", as this is the most commonly-used convention at this time (see the table to the right). Approximately 585 project banners are likely to need moving. The actual process of moving the templates will be done by a monitored, automated script, according to the following process:
- The script will scan Category:WikiProject banners for banners which are not of the correct style.
- The script will identify from links of the form
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject ...]], categories, and (if necessary) human intervention, which WikiProject the banner belongs to - The script will then check the nature of the page at Template:WikiProject XXX:
- If the page contains content, or is a redirect to a page other than the banner template, the banner will be skipped. This is to avoid disrupting situations like that at {{WikiProject Maths}}, which use their project banner in a slightly unorthodox fashion (see this discussion for an explanation).
- If the page is a redirect to the banner template, it will be deleted
- If the page does not exist, all is well :D
- The script will then move the banner template and its talk page to its standardised title, automatically creating a redirect from the original title.
- Any double redirects will then be automatically fixed.
- The /doc subpage of the template, if it exists, will be moved appropriately
- Any subpages of the original banner will be moved, and any double redirects fixed in the same fashion
- Rinse, lather, repeat until all banners have been standardised.
[edit] Impact
The net effect of this will be to move the project banner with little or no disruption to the appearance or function of the templates.
[edit] Impact on WikiProjects
All WikiProjects will still be able to use their old tags on talk pages; all the existing template calls on talk pages will continue to display normally. Shortcuts used for convenience (like {{WPBIO}} in place of {{WikiProject Biography}}, or {{WPMCB}} in place of {{WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology}}) will continue to function, and there is no need to deprecate the use of such redirects. Only the underlying infrastructure will be affected.
[edit] Technical impact
Voice of All, a mediawiki developer, has indicated that moving templates does not add pages to the job queue; so moving {{WPBiography}}, for instance, will not force all 516,000 pages on which is is used to be recached. It has also been confirmed that the additional server load of having to process those extra redirects is negligible in comparision to the resources required to actually expand the template when the page is displayed. In short, this standardisation should have little or no impact on the servers or on the functionality of the templates.
