Category talk:Templates
Spring Clean
Do we have too many templates and template categories? Could some simplification, rationalization and documentation help us understand what tools we have to better the wiki? Perhaps we could use this talk page for such suggestions? Once done, or while it's been done, it might be nice to have a wiki page that summarizes our templates with a quick overview of how they work. I didn't know about {{tl}} until its updates recently but it is a particularly useful tool I now keep using (I just did again). --Fleanetha (talk) 11:06, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
- Too many? Templates - probably - some appear to be ported over from previous incarnations or other projects and are only used by documentation or help files and nowhere else. Template categories - maybe - the distinction between a few (like Category:General wiki templates and Category:Utility templates isn't obvious to me yet. As you've seen I like to have clean docs for using them as well. Some of the current docs don't reference features of the template that are useful (fixed example - using labels with {{See also}} --FoiledAgain (talk) 11:33, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
- Okay - there are 936 templates used on the wiki. Take away the doc pages and citation templates gets us down to 362. It's going to take a while to go through all of them. --FoiledAgain (talk) 02:29, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks and kudos for tackling this, FoiledAgain. As you can I'm sure see, they're really a hodge-podge. For a long time, no one working on the project really knew what we were doing, so we just copied stuff from other projects that seemed to know what they were doing. Hopefully you can tidy it up some. Feel free to ask any questions you might have, as I think I'm the Chronicler with the longest institutional memory regarding this stuff, and was often the one doing the template work in the early days. —
Yoda8myhead (talk) 09:18, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks and kudos for tackling this, FoiledAgain. As you can I'm sure see, they're really a hodge-podge. For a long time, no one working on the project really knew what we were doing, so we just copied stuff from other projects that seemed to know what they were doing. Hopefully you can tidy it up some. Feel free to ask any questions you might have, as I think I'm the Chronicler with the longest institutional memory regarding this stuff, and was often the one doing the template work in the early days. —
- Who says I know what I'm doing either? :) I've taken a stab at giving each template a summarized purpose as the first step to any desired recategorization. It's still a work of progress - i'm not sure I consistently applied the same rationale throughout the list. I have made this an editable Google spreadsheet if anyone wants to check it out. --FoiledAgain (talk) 12:20, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
- Well done FoiledAgain - s/s is excellent idea - I am already tinkering as you'll see there. I have made a new list which is substantially shorter of all the adminy templates. Citations, etc., are well understood so I want to focus on the less loved ones. I also know that Yoda8myhead has a longer term project to move all old-style infoboxes to new style navboxes, so I will leave those alone too. --Fleanetha (talk) 10:33, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
- Just saw the sheet you added, including the comment log. I think I've finished documenting the "as-is" case. I see those interested being able to start collaborating on what the "to-be" hierarchy of templates (including category names). How do you see us proceeding Fleanetha? -- Bill (FoiledAgain) (talk) 17:34, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
check that the 3 reports tally with the data on your first tabRemove duplicates - a number of the templates at the bottom of the list are duplicates of templates above, e.g., DEGII, ISWGII??- Then with your super list we can start categorizing everything appropriately as you mention above - the 'to-be' state.
Phase 2
I have done a final review of Bill (FoiledAgain)'s master list and I reckon it's ready and we can now work from that pretty authoritatively - cheers Bill. I'd suggest we tackle the largest areas first which will mean we can then remove them and see the remainder better. Any thoughts on this? Next stages? --Fleanetha (talk) 13:51, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- As Bill suggests I see no reason to craft a new category: Category:Citation templates seems a sensible name.
- I have made a note to Yodabot at User_talk:YodaBot about finally getting rid of 'Cite article' templates which would be a good thing. They all seem now to be uncategorized redirects to the cite book template.
- Any modern format redirects (cite book or ebook type) we have for templates would probably also sensibly go into Category:Citation templates so they are easier to find
- Having Template:Cite web, Template:Fact, Template:Refs, Template:Refs2 in Category:Citation templates exactly as they are also makes sense so no change needed I think
- Category:Web citation templates are few and now rarely used - not sure what to do with them - leave as is?
- I have posed a question to Yoda8myhead re this before we get started in earnest to understand the lie of the land.
- Ultimately, Bill's suggestion of a new Category:Navigational templates seems sensible for all of these type of template and then delete the two older ones
- The newer 'list' templates, which just help populate navboxes, should also be categorized in this new category but maybe as a subcategory of Category:Navigational list templates?
- Anything which is not associated with navigational templates should be removed from this area and placed elsewhere. Strictly limit this to templates that appear at the bottom of a page as a box with content within
- Fine as-is, I'd say - just needs checking
With the holiday travels, I've been behind and missed keeping up with some of this. I just copied over some suggested categories to the spreadsheet that may not incorporate everything from the Phase 2 suggestions Fleanetha outlined. Another set of eyes would be helpful as I'm not sure how internally consistent I'm being in categorizing all 979 templates.
I was looking at a category hierarchy that looks like this:
- Citation templates
- Content templates
- Infoboxes
- List templates
- Navigational templates
- Formatting Templates
- Alignment Templates
- Forum templates
- Yearbox templates
- Task templates
- Template documentation
- User profile templates
- Utility templates
- Copyright Templates
Indentation indicates a sub-category. There are other ways they could be organized, such as formatting templates being a sub-category of utility templates. But, I thought it may be best for newer users to be able to find it at the top level. --Bill (FoiledAgain) (talk) 11:32, 4 January 2013 (UTC)