Template talk:Aircontent/Archive 1

Archive 1

bulleted lists

I think that the bulleted lists are less clean (in most cases) than the linear ones utilised in the black box. (See Convair B-36#Related content) for an example. Ingoolemo ^talk 05:20, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

That's not set in the template, it's up to the editor. To be honest, I think that while they might look cleaner in a linear design, it's more difficult to read. It's easier to read a linear sequence, but when there's other information there - like manufacturers or model nicknames - it gets difficult. That's why I personally prefer the lists. Either way, that's not something we can run with the template. -eric ✈ 05:41, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

List and see also fields

I have added list and see also fields to the template. I will fix the problems these new fields have created. Kudos to Eric or whoever thought up the scheme to toggle the fields on and off.

The toggling is causing some problems with the display, by inserting extra linebreaks when a field is switched off; I will try to fix them, but may not succeed. Ingoolemo ^talk 17:53, 2005 August 2 (UTC)

If you fix the existing articles (I'll do this too) then I can fix the line breaks. Since we're revising, I'm going to add "has related development" as well. :) -eric ✈ 17:57, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

update: I seem to have gotten almost all the line breaking fixed. The only one I cannot is when relations are turned off, then there's a gap. I'm sure we'll sort something out, though. everything's working as it should! :) -eric ✈ 18:22, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Reservations

I have reservations about this template.

It interests me because I also would like variant record structure for a template or two; the most straightforward way of building a template fails, since unsupplied parameters display as the parameter placeholder. But the approach taken here seems intolerably clunky. The effect is to restrict use to a small group who thoroughly understand how the template works.

I'm not sure I see the value of the template, since all the substantial information is supplied when it is used. That is, it does not supply content; and the form it supplies is so very straightforward. Why cannot the content just be entered inline? If some sort of subsection framework is desired, would not a solution similar to {{doctl}} (see talk) be sufficient?

I'd like to discuss these issues with those editors involved. Thank You! — Xiong熊talk* 15:55, 2005 August 17 (UTC)

Latest?

Hi all. I received a message from eric, who suggested that I reformat my Hawker Tornado article to use this template. However there seems to be some doubt as to whether everyone is going firm on this set-up, so should I go ahead and make changes or wait and see what else comes along? Thanks guys!--Xiphon 18:23, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Problems with this template

This template has a number of problems that I'm not convinced can be solved easily.

1. The main problem is that it uses a "template within a template" scheme which is harmful on the servers.
2. It places content which should be in the article itself, into a template which is hard for new editors to understand, and probably very easy to foul up.
3. The headings, particularly the standard "See also" and "External links" ones, do not show up in the table of contents. See Lockheed SR-71 for example.

All in all, I don't consider this a very appropriate use for a template. This text should be part of the main article body. Are there any compelling reasons for using this that I'm not aware of? -- Netoholic @ 08:06, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

While I agree that this template is better substed in the first place (which would solve the first two problems), I think most of your other concerns can be adressed by simply renaming "related content" to "see also", reordering the sections so that the former "see also" links comes before the fake sections and making "external links" a true header. Circeus 19:58, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

If you agree, then I'd like to make changes to this template so that it can be subst:d into the articles, and so that it will leave the proper level of headings. -- Netoholic @ 20:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

oppose. The original WP:Air related content was (and in many cases is) in a table, with no standardized headings at all. I've made See also and External links into H2s, as requested, but the 'template within a template' is using QIF - the entire purpose of that template. This makes conversion of hundreds of articles at once to a new standard (for instance, the change from bold to header text I just made) much more practical, something which I feel justifies slightly higher server strain. ericg ✈ 20:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Qif is being deprecated, per WP:AUM which is how I found this template. Also, templates are not supposed to "masquerade" as article content, because that confuses new editors. Templates are fine to use to provide a "skeleton" for an article, for use with subst:, but should not be used to hold the entirety of the articles formatting. I don't want to force the issue, but we must remove the Qif template, per policy and the developers' request to do, and we need to also follow the guideline that templates aren't use to only format large sections of article text. I'm confident that if I were to take this to WP:TFD, that the result (which I've seen before) will be either to delete or keep, but only use with subst. -- Netoholic @ 20:28, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

While I do not always agree with netoholic, hedoes have a strongpoint about templates not masquerading for content. Besides, a "newbie" is unlikelyto not be a member of WP:Air and still use this template. Circeus 01:39, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

This is the point I made on the WP:Air talk page. Since the only requirement for editing Wikipedia is an internet connection, maintaining high quality and consistent style is dependent on a dedicated group of editors. I leave references to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/page_content whenever I reformat a page in the hopes of educating the author. The major convenience of templates is the ability to change formatting on all pages using it without having to manually edit 2,000+ entries. I wish there was a PHP-like way to generate layout around contents on Wikipedia. - Emt147 ^Burninate! 02:06, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I have reinstated {{qif}}, because it is very useful for this particular template. If the issue is that this particular template is masquerading as content, then {{aircontent}} should be deprecated, not {{qif}}. Also, qif is not being completely deprecated; see Template talk:Qif and [1]. Ingoolemo ^talk 06:48, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Do not use this template!

The layout provided by this template is wrong. Per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/page_content External Links are a separate section preceding Related content. Because Related content is hard-written into each page, there is no way to make this template generate the correct output. - Emt147 ^Burninate! 05:39, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

The template has now been fixed. Please be sure to place external links in the standard location. Ingoolemo ^talk 07:10, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Similar-looking aircraft

I have a couple of copies of Jane's Aircraft Recognition Guides. In it, for each aircraft's entry, they list the aircraft that it might be reasonably confused with. For instance, the F/A-18 would be easily confused with the Fulcrum or even the Foxbat, while the Tu-154 and 727 were lopped together. Is this a field that we might want to add to this template? I realize this might be subjective; we could use Jane's as the source as it is fairly impartial. —Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 07:08, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Template in conflict with regular section order

Hi, wikipedia has a regular order of section, among them, these order for sections towards the end:

• See also
• References
• External links
• Navboxes
• Categories
• Language interwiki-links

I tried fixing Boeing Pelican in this manner, but couldn't, which is why I arrived here. This template seems to move "Related content" and the Navboxes together, making it impossible to add "References" and "External links" sections properly. Could somebody please disentangle this template to allow articles that are similar to the other 100k articles that use that order? Thanks :-)

PS: This talk page also suggest renaming "See also" into "Related content", which is a nice idea in principle, but doesn't work well with the prevalent word usage inside wikipedia. Peter S. 16:20, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I have reverted your changes on Pelican, but also made other improvements to further wikify the article. This template falls under the purview of WP:AIR. and its use on the Boeing Pelican page is consistent with Wikipedia:WikiProject Aircraft/page content guidelines. These are somewhat different than the Wiki-wide guidelines in order to fit the preferred presentation of information within the Aircraft Project. If you disagree with the guidelines, you may take up the issue on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aircraft. But be aware that the Wiki "regular section order" is just a set of guideliens, and that Wikipedia projects can and do develop their own guidelines to suit their needs. - BillCJ 16:35, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. Peter S. 16:40, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

My recent reverts

I have come to the conclusion that these changes have been causing false "edit" buttons to appear in the template on articles. I know absolutely nothing about coding these templates, so I can't help fix the problem beyond reverting. Evidently closing the <h3> tags causes the problem to occur, at least on WinXP running IE6. We probably need to verify that the problem occurs with other browsers too. - BillCJ (talk) 05:47, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem is the same in all browsers. The 'edit' links for each section are generated by the MediaWiki software when the page is served, and is thus browser independent. Still, thank you for noting the problem. Karl Dickman ^talk 19:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Blank lines

This template is showing several blank lines after it in Boeing 747 for example. Not sure where that comes from in the code. But I am wondering if the double blank lines (<br><br>) are really needed after each field? Seems like 1 is enough, unless I'm missing something. Thanks. -Fnlayson (talk) 21:37, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

• Nevermind on the double blank lines (<br><br>). That should only cause 1 blank line the way they are used. -Fnlayson (talk) 21:06, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

With the recent parser preprocessor changes, the spacing got messed up it seems. I removed some extra <br> and that seems to have fixed it. -Fnlayson (talk) 05:09, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Use for aero engines?

Would it be possible to produce another one of these for aircraft engines? I think all that needs to be changed is 'Comparable aircraft' to 'Comparable engines'. Many thanks. Nimbus (talk) 17:31, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Split documentation

{{editprotected}}

Please sync this template with the new sandbox, which creates a separate documentation page. Thanks. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 21:22, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Done. — RockMFR 23:36, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

"Comparable aircraft"

{{editprotected}}

As a test, I'd like to change the output of the "similar aircraft" field from "Comparable aircraft" to "Similar aircraft". This has been discussed at [[WT:AIR]on several occasions, but with no definite conclusion. I think the looser label might alleviate some of the constant debate over what aircrft are actually "comparable", but "similar" might be too loose, hence a test. Thanks. - BilCat (talk) 17:58, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki link

Hi ! Could an admin add fr:Modèle:Contenu-aéro to the page ? Thanks ! Gonzolito (talk) 13:20, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Done. Thanks! --Rlandmann (talk) 13:25, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Whitespace

This template causes huge gulfs of whitespace on pages. In order to alleviate that, I'm proposing that we add columns to it in order to reduce the amount of whitespace, at least for most readers.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 10:58, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with it and would disagree with the proposed change, there is space on the right but so is there in many aircraft and engine specification sections, these often get filled with an image, by tradition we don't generally add images to the 'see also' section. If there is vertical whitespace in a particular article then someone has left blank lines that should be removed. I suspect this page is not well watched, your proposal should be raised at WT:AIR, the template is used in many thousands of articles, converting them all to a new format when we have layout stability across the aircraft project articles would not be the most popular task. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 13:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

If you are getting lots of whitespace it may be a browser-related issue. I am not seeing any problem in Chromium 11.0.696.71 (same as Google Chrome) or in Epiphany 2.30.6. If by chance you are using an older non-standards compliant version of Internet Explorer (anything older than IE9) then that may be causing the problem. - Ahunt (talk) 14:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Here's an example screenshot. This is what the current See also section of the Boeing 737 article looks like (Firefox 4.0.1 or Internet Explorer 9)

300

Some of you may not see an issue with that, but I do.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 19:26, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks much more like an editorial problem at Boeing 737 than a template problem to me. The list of comparable aircraft is way too long, there are aircraft from different eras, different weight/capacity classes, three engined aircraft and one that hasn't even flown yet. Realising that this listing can get out of hand in articles we formulated advice guidelines for the engine task force which I believe works very well, not sure if there are guidelines for the aircraft 'see also' sections but some articles obviously need to be looked at. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 20:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I just checked and the aircraft project does have a very similar guideline. I would say that the 737 article is not following it. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 20:45, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Nimbus, that is not a template problem, the template is being misused in that article needs a serious clean up. Any template can be overloaded to the point of non-functionality. If you check a proper use of it, as in Cessna 172 or DFS Weihe, you will see it works fine. - Ahunt (talk) 21:29, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I just pulled the 737 article as an example, almost at random, though. The template adds the pseudo-headings within the section, which adds quite a bit of space vertically. More importantly though, the use of the template on the 747 article is typical of how it's used in most articles... if you folks want to run around and try to police the see also sections of all the pages that use this template, I'm certainly not going to stop you. It just seems much more efficient to me to work with the template itself in order to alleviate the whitespace problem. Anyway, I don't have any real desire to step on the toes of thse of you involved with the aircraft project, I just wanted to bring this issue to your awareness, and I hope that you guys can do something to alleviate it (since I'm incapable of helping out here).
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 21:41, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I think you have brought up a good point that these lists need cleaning up and paring down. Some of them are too fat and it is impairing the articles. We should make an effort to go through and do that. I'll bring it up at WP:AIR. - Ahunt (talk) 21:49, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Even the Cessna article, which was provided as an appropriate use, creates a large swath of whitespace:

So, I don't think that we're talking about simple "misuse" of the template here.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 21:50, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

(EC)Well at least it has highlighted the problem with how the template is actually being used, it's a known problem and despite maintaining editors' best efforts things get out of hand. The entry at de Havilland Gyron is how I like to see it, longer entries are unavoidable at times (but they can still be kept in check). It's amusing to me that the one aircraft that looks more like an original 737 than a 737, the Dassault Mercure, is not even in the list. We should and will highlight this discussion at WT:AIR. Please leave it with us. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 21:54, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Part of the problem in your uploaded examples there is that you seem to be using a screen width of over 1500 pixels (that last one was 1586 px). As outlined here that is a very rare and wide screen width. In any fluid website design, as opposed to fixed width, that will create unavoidable compromises in display. As you can see in that survey data the most common screen width used is 1024 px and only 11% of internet users are using screen widths of 1500 px and up. If you use a wide enough screen width any website will cease to work right. If you reduce your browser width by 1/3 you will see how most internet users see these pages and the whitespace is greatly reduced, even on articles where the lists need cropping. - Ahunt (talk) 22:05, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Widescreen geometries used to be uncommon, but their quickly becoming the standard. I'm on a newer laptop right now, but it's nothing special. More importantly, every computer at work and most of them at school are using widescreen aspect ratios now (1280x800 is at 17% in your cite, vs. 19% for the older 1024x768 standard). So, I don't really buy the "that is a very rare and wide screen width" argument (for the record, both screeshots were taken from a 1600x900 desktop). Even at lower resolutions though... I mean, yea, the widescreen format adds more whitespace horizontally, but it's the vertical height of the single column of text that causes the issue, and that's going to be basically the same at any resolution. This issue has bugged me for years, even when I was using a 1024x768 screen day-to-day not too long ago. So yea, at lower resolutions whe total amount of whitespace is reduced simply because the horizontal space is reduced, but it's still there. If there's more then 3 or 4 items in a see also section (with or without this template) then the whitespace issue becomes geometrically worse. This template actually makes that worse by adding the bolded, larger font sized, pseudo-headings withing the section. The normal solution that I use to resolve this issue, when it seems to be getting out of hand, is to place sections of the see also listings into a couple of columns (which helps everyone except IE users of course, but at least it's something... something other then trying to police see also sections across the site, at least). The problem here is, that isn't really an option on pages that use this template, which is why I've finally started a discussion about it here. (ps.: we could use em widths [30em seems to be best] instead of hard coding a specific number of columns, which would account for differences between 1024x768 screens and 1600x900 screens.)
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 22:41, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

The discussion we have had and are again having at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aircraft indicates that the problem with adding columns is mostly that will encourage more fancruft and longer lists, which we would really like to avoid. We are working on it over there, but so far the consensus seems to be in favour of cleaning up and shortening the lists. - Ahunt (talk) 22:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough. We could further alleviate the problem by reducing the font size of the pseudo-headings within this template (related development, comparable aircraft, related lists, etc...). If I could editorialize a bit more though, this sort of thing is why I don't like this template at all. I realize that trying to convince you guys not to use this template any longer would probably be tantamount to tilting at windmills, but consider the point that if there weren't a template involved here then the issue could be addressed at the individual article level. The one-size-fit's-all approached that relying on this template forces only complicates dealing with these sorts of layout issues, in my view. Regards,
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 23:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the input. Changes to, or even eliminating the template, have been discussed in the past. Perhaps we should consider that again. - Ahunt (talk) 23:59, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

What about placing items to the right of the template, such as portals or images of some sort? How does McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet#See also look on screen? Is this better, or does it not work at all? - BilCat (talk) 01:05, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, I mean, it's a little better, sure. I don't think that resolves the problem though, you know?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 11:51, 31 May 2011 (UTC)