Template talk:Year in other calendars table

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This is the discussion/talk page for: Template:Year in other calendars table

Contents 1 Created 2 Avoided megalink crisis 3 Other issues 4 Alignment

[edit] Created

01-Jan-2008: The horizontal "Template:Year in other calendars table" was created as a compact, horizontal version of the vertical infobox "Template:Year in other calendars" to be used where the vertical space is restricted, such as in short articles, or articles with several right-side images. As a horizontal table, the new template can be expanded without disturbing the vertical formatting of articles where it is being used. Normally, vertical infoboxes are stable and don't impact article formatting, but the other-calendars infobox has been expanded several times, and requests have been made to add Byzantine and Spanish calendars into the list as well. The compact horizontal table can be expanded easily without impacting the formats of other articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:37, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Avoided megalink crisis

01-Jan-2008: I have moved the 24 wikilinks to calendar names into the subpage "/details" to avoid propagating megalinks. Each calendar name formerly wikilinked in the table had the potential to propagate 5,000 links (based on expected usage of the other-calendars table). The megalink crisis emerged last year (2007) as thousands of stub articles were being expanded to link common navigation boxes and infoboxes, which in turn linked hundreds of words each. If an infobox links about 100 words, and that infobox is then transcluded into 10,000 articles, then 100 x 10,000 = 1 million wikilinks will be generated for the Wikipedia page-link database. When one wikilink is removed from a template, reducing the links to 99, then Wikipedia (after a few minutes) will pause for a while as it unlinks those 10,000 articles from that wikilinked word. The overlinking is not an issue that most novice users of Wikipedia would even realize.

Many other templates have already propagated over 500,000 wikilinks each, from the original intention of listing only a hundred related articles. The megalink crisis has just begun to grow, and a simple solution is to move wikilinks down to a documentation subpage of an infobox (as done here to the other-calendars table), or simply avoid overlinking too many words in a nav-box. Some notorious examples of megalinking are the words "City" or "County" or "km" which should not be linked in infoboxes or nav-boxes, but could be handled on doc subpages. Another example is automated wikilinking done in user-talk pages by anti-vandal bots, generating 5 wikilinks every time any article is reverted from vandalism (!!!). At the beginning of year 2008, there are many, many millions of excessive wikilinks. The other-calendars table is no longer part of that megalink crisis. -Wikid77 (talk) 21:26, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Other issues

[ Discuss other, unnamed issues here. -Wikid77 ]

[edit] Alignment

In Firefox, there's a serious problem with alignment. The columns of numbers are all over the place. Needs fixing urgently - this wasn't an issue with the old template. Warofdreams talk 23:54, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

As there has been no action on this in almost two weeks, I've removed this table from articles until it's fixed. Warofdreams talk 11:03, 17 January 2008 (UTC)