Talk:2015 UEFA European Under-17 Championship qualification

New format for tables

@Schnapper, Equineducklings, Itxia, Skyblueshaun, Dr. Vicodine, and Portugaljunior: You have recently edited this pages, so I am notifying you of the following post.
Over the last year or so there have been several drives to improve football tables across Wikipedia, largely driven from WP:FOOTY. A lot of these improvements are not possible with simple template coding, so efforts have started to use Lua to implement this. At the same time several discussion have taken place on WT:FOOTY about different aspects of the way these should look, one of the conclusions was that the way group tables are displayed currently is in violation of the Manual of Style, in particular WP:ACCESS. All these issues have been combined into the new Module:Sports table, which is fully MOS-compliant and harmonizes several things between league and group tables. This module should also make it easier for people to edit these tables, because it only consists of one module rather than four distinct templates. This module has been tested on a limited scale so far, I intent to replace the tables on this page with this module to test how it works for group tables in season. If you have any concerns, questions, problems or comments, then do not hesitate to contact me about it. I have the tables drafted in my prep area (User:CRwikiCA/LuaTest) and will include them in the article tomorrow. CRwikiCA talk 20:49, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm against this new format as it doesn't show the borders (green and blue lines) and the current qualification statut of the teams (for example, the current top placed teams would be highlighted in green as if they would be qualified no matter what, even if they can still be eliminated, so it will confuse the readers, the same principle applies to the runners-up ranking). So please don't include them in this article. Schnapper (talk) 22:07, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

I have not looked at the format enough to be able to give an opinion on if it's a good idea or not. I do think it would be nice if there was a consensus among the experienced editors so that there was more uniformity across the board in how tables should be formatted. Since I have not created a large number of tables, I tend to use whatever format the creator of the page chose when editing or adding a table to an existing page. Not only would I like to see more uniformity in which format is used, it would also be nice if how easy a table is to edit was part of the decision.Equineducklings (talk) 22:31, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

@Equineducklings: One of the goals is to make these tables easier to set up and easier to update, especially for novice users. The current format of using four distinct (and varying) templates is not a good point in my opinion. Feedback on how the new module set-up could be made easier would always be helpful.
@Schnapper: If I understand your comment correct, you are not against the Lua-module itself, you are more concerned with the lay-out changes. Currently there is a different format used for league tables and group tables, this has always been confusing to me (and probably to other users as well) and there is no good reason for it (note that {{2010 FIFA World Cup qualification – CONMEBOL}} and {{2014–15 Scottish Championship table}} have the same number of teams, but the existence of colour has a different meaning for both). Switching to an new way to build tables (the module is MOS:DTT-compliant, unlike the current table format) is the ideal point to rethink the way tables are displayed and harmonize the differences between league and group tables (which seem to have evolved independently so far), to ultimately have one style across Wikipedia so people are clear with what happens. For these reasons, we developed Module:Sports table, which is now in its test phase, so any suggestions for improvements are always welcome. During these discussion we noted that the current practice of group tables is in violation of the Manual of Style, in particular MOS:COLOR. In particular, Background color should be used only as a supplementary visual cue, which means that just colour coding it is not enough. Especially coloured borders are not explained (unless you already know the results and are intimately familiar with Wikipedia, you wouldn't know the meaning). In the harmonized scheme, which is mostly the previous league table standard, colours and their meaning are always present in the table, letters next to the teams now indicate their qualification status. Do you think any additional elements/notes would make it clearer? (I understand change always causes some conservatism and some readers would need to get used to it, but in the long run it would be good in my opinion to have a consistent style across all football articles.) Because this is an initial test and because of your extensive contributions to football articles it would be great if you would agree and would be willing to test the new set-up and provide feedback and suggestions on possible improvements to the module.
@Qed237: This discussion might interest you as well.
CRwikiCA talk 14:01, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

I just got notified about this discussion and have a few minor things i might add. As CRwikiCA mentioned the old system uses a lot of templates (some of which should not be used per consensus to remove use of fb team-templates) and they are different from table to table so this is an attempt to make all tables more similar. It all started about a year ago when league tables were used in various ways on league articles and club season articles and often the tables were not updated properly on the clubpages so a league table template was used. But then with a template it showed entire league (all teams) which is not needed (according to consensus) for article about a specific club but instead we wanted to show only teams nearest the club for the respective article. A solution was developed at Village pump (technical) and the result can be seen at {{2013–14 Premier League table}}. During this procedure the idea of LUA was hatched and it has been to footy several times for discussion on layout and colors. The LUA version is much easier to update. If you dont like it feel free to open a new discussion at footy or come with other ideas how to do this, perhaps we should only have it for league tables, but that may confuse readers? QED237 (talk) 15:16, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

The module got renamed to Module:Sports table to prevent future forking issues, the usage remains the same though. CRwikiCA talk 16:06, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

I will go ahead and implement the change, seeing how there is no-one disagreeing with my latest posts. Please also note this is a test case to see how this set-up works for group tables. CRwikiCA talk 02:18, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

This phase of the tournament has almost concluded, how would you review the user friendliness and features of Module:Sports table to build these tables? Do you have any additional suggestions? CRwikiCA talk 14:12, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@CRwikiCA: I just have one comment. It was easy for people (including myself) to miss updating |updated=. I believe it is because we usually dont have the dates on group tables, but it could also be the position of parameter as the table is updated a bit down and the parameter was at the top. Also I found no information in the template documentation what to write when all matches has/has been played. Looking at other groups and the module code I found out it should be "complete" but it was not obvious. I have seen other documentations with list of parameters and their possible values, perhaps that is a good idea for the module documentaion? And to have a comment in the table could be good, like

<!--use the word complete when all matches has been played-->

An other idea could be to change the text below table depending on the stage of the group, from "First match(es) will be played on 5 January 2015" to "Updated to match(es) played on 52 February 2015" and finally "All matches has been played" or something like that? To add the last text should not be to hard just add a if and check if parameter is "final" or "complete" or something, while the first text may be hard to implement? QED237 (talk) 14:49, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@Qed237: Updating the documentation can always be done, but splitting the option like you suggest would work as well (and then improve upon the documentation). CRwikiCA talk 14:56, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@Qed237: I made the changes and updated the documentation, is the documentation now clear to you? CRwikiCA talk 19:10, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@CRwikiCA: Yes it is clear, I was thinking something like the paramter section in documentation for Template:Fb cl header to explain parameters and usage, but I think what you have done is also clear. As long as the info is there I am happy. QED237 (talk) 21:21, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@Qed237: A parameter section is need for people that have coding experience, I figured having the thematic style explanation might work well for people that are not used to coding. CRwikiCA talk 14:09, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

@CRwikiCA: Well, I find it more difficult to edit this new template. I spend more time on it than the standard one because you have to modify more things. But the main disadvantage of this template is that you can't easily recognize qualified and eliminated teams when you quickly look at the rankings because all teams are highlighted (you have to watch for the tiny (A) and (E) instead). I definitely prefer by far the current standard template where I can easily identify the status of the teams by quickly scrolling the page (only qualified teams are highlighted in green, only eliminated teams are highlighted in red). Can't we simply stick to the standard template and apply it to league rankings by adding explanations about the significance of the colored borders (ie. "teams finishing above the green border advance, teams highlighted in green have secured qualifiation")? Schnapper (talk) 11:36, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

@Schnapper: There currently is a discussion ongoing at WT:FOOTY about general adoption on the wikiproject, so far nobody has been against it, so if you have objection you would probably want to raise your objection there on short notice. I will answer to your specific issues here though: Unifying the format has already reached consensus before, mostly because using the coloured lines is in direct violation of MOS:ACCESS with two issues. First, nowhere it is clearly explained what these lines mean, so unless you know the editing practices you wouldn't know where to look for the meaning. Second, colour impaired people wouldn't easily distinguish the different colours used. Using only a coloured bar without further identifying mark also goes against the Manual of Style per WP:COLOR, that is, there is no accessible symbol or anything used. Because the module is modified and documented a lot of people find it easier to understand and edit, I appreciate you are very familiar with the current template structure, but for new editors it is quite inaccessible to set up. CRwikiCA talk 16:11, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

I missed the discussion on the WT:FOOTY page, but had I seen it at the time then I would definitely have been against certain elements of this new template. I like the unified colour scheme, which makes a great deal of sense, but I don't believe it should be applied to all columns of the table from the start - I think only the final "Qualification" column should be coloured until a team actually secures their place. The addition of letters to identify whether a team has qualified or not is confusing and I can't see how this makes things clearer for the reader. For example, I believe the table here would be much clearer if only the "Qualification" column of the 2nd place row was coloured light blue because I believe the current format could confuse many people into thinking that Slovenia had already secured that place - that was the case when I first looked at it. I'd also be in favour of colouring eliminated nations red while the tournament was in progress because again I believe this is much easier to understand than the bracketed letter E after their name. There's a similar issue with 2015_AFC_Champions_League - to me displaying the tables like this suggests that the teams coloured green have already progressed. There are numerous similar dissenting comments on other articles such as 2014/15 UEFA Champions League: Talk. I know this stuff was all done for good reasons and that consistency across articles is a good thing, but I hope there's still scope for fine tuning. Craig1989 (talk) 23:36, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

@Craig1989: If you have any suggestions for changing the templates, you would find the widest audience at WT:FOOTY. Note that the letters and colour system had been the long-standing use for league articles. In my eyes there is no reason to have a different standard for leagues than for groups. CRwikiCA talk 14:13, 26 March 2015 (UTC)