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Years in title of table

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Actually

{{{start}}}{{#if:{{{end|}}}|–{{{end}}}|–}}

would always be the same as

{{{start}}}–{{{end|}}}

I'd change this but I'd like to ask first, should it just say "19XX–present" if there is no end year, or are there cases where "present" would be incorrect (end year exists but hasn't been entered)? — CharlotteWebb 16:30, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In every case where an end year exists, it has been entered.
Assuming the start year is 1948, the current display is either 1948–1977 (if the end year is 1977) or "1948—" if there is no end year.
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Other_date_ranges says nothing on whether the trailing emdash is acceptable, but specifically deprecates the "19XX–present" format which you suggest. The guideline's suggestion of "since 1948" seems unhelpful here, because it adds an extra word which I think reduces clarity. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:40, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed width

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See my note at User talk:CharlotteWebb about the problems with trying to use fixed width for this table. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:43, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well is no way to make the caption the same width as the table without somehow forcing the caption and the table to use the same fixed width, or making the caption part of the table itself, but in this case the caption is so long that doing this would stretch the table to 100% unless a smaller size is specified. The only other way would be to manually add hard line-breaks to the caption, which would be an even sloppier approach. I give up. — CharlotteWebb 02:12, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I gave up too :(
In the end the inelegant disclaimer-much-wider-than-table seems like the least-worst option. I'll revisit the disclaimer in {{Irish TD table end}} and see if I can shorten the wording. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:12, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Somehow I thought of another way in my sleep. You could specify a fixed width for each column rather than for the entire table. You would apply it to the first single-cell of each column, and it would make all the columns the same width (this would arguably be a cosmetic improvement in any case). Then the div can match the total width of the table by multiplying.

Election winners
year column 1 column 2 column 3 column 4 column 5
2000 Joe Anne Garret Charlie Sean
2001 Catherine Mary
2002 Eric
2003 Michael Brian
Note The columns in this table are used only for presentational purposes, and no significance should be attached to the order of columns or the numbers attached to them.

Try it with more columns

Election winners
year column 1 column 2 column 3 column 4 column 5 column 6 column 7 column 8 column 9
2000 Joe Anne Garret Charlie Sean Eduardo Fausto Angelina Jesús
2001 Catherine Mary Gonzalo Mercedes
2002 Eric Teodoro Rosalva Sergio
2003 Michael Brian Reymundo Fernando
Note The columns in this table are used only for presentational purposes, and no significance should be attached to the order of columns or the numbers attached to them.

Believe it or not I am trying to help. — CharlotteWebb 15:17, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]


References broken

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@BrownHairedGirl: Your changes in these edits end up breaking references in lots of including articles. These articles all have undefined reference errors, now, even though they include a refs= parameter for this template:

I think some invoking articles will lose a reference even if it didn't cause an error for an invocation of that reference name, as well. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:40, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Mikeblas: please note that I didn't get a ping from you in your 24 July post,[2] because you mis-spelt my name. You fixed the spelling in your next edit,[3] but that doesn't make a ping: a ping only works in a new post. See WP:PING
So the first I knew about any of this was today, when I was notified of your reverts, which mangled at least one navbox (and up to 4) on all the biographical articles about Ireland's most senior politicians in the last 101 years. Your cure was more damaging than the problem it sought to resolve.
Before you reverted a widely-used template which you acknowledge you don't understand (and where your failed testcases suggest that you had not even read the /doc), it would have been better to make an actual ping or to post a brief message on my talk asking for my attention. As you can see, i responded very promptly when I was actually notified: only 13 minutes from your first revert to my fix.
This i not the first time that you have waded in with ill-considered reverts to this series of templates while development was underway. Please in future, more communication, less haste. Thanks. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:37, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry that my fix wasn't ideal. But please try to be kind: I'm trying to fix a problem I see. It's the second time I've drawn your attention to this same failure mode, which means it's the second time that you have broken the status quo behaviour of the template. That is, you are also causing some problems with your edits, despite the snarky and acerbic admonishments you're fond of writing. You didn't write tests yourself, so it can't be surprising that your changes broke functionality. You also didn't manually check on cases that you knew your changes had broken before. The old code worked fine on the testcase I wrote, so your declaration that it "isn't valid" seems a little dramatic ... or at least not clearly founded. Maybe you have some new behaviour you're struggling to implement -- the documentation you wrote was written after the referencing problems began happening. And what if your documentation simply isn't as clear as you think it is?
Sounds to me like we're both trying to make things better but not always meeting with complete success -- but you somehow think you're better at it than I am. I guess it's because it's because of the way you want to keep score. why do you think "damaging up to 4 articles" with a fix that resolved issues for about a dozen articles is worse? Why do you think waiting five days is "hasty"?
Meanwhile, I'm glad you've got a fix in place and I hope you'll take a moment to consider that other editors are real people ... just like you. -- Mikeblas (talk) 00:28, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Mikeblas: I have built a very powerful and widely-used metatemplate which relies on the enhanced version of these templates.
Sure, I haven't spotted every glitch, but I have responded promptly when I become aware of them. There have been many glitches along the way, which I have worked hard to remedy ASAP, and have mostly fixed very promptly (the slowest case took a few hours). You seem to have missed the fact that your rapid reverts damaged over 1400 articles, which is a much bigger problem than the one you were trying to fix. (Note: I did not say that you damaged 4 articles; I said that you damaged up to 4 navboxes on each of 1400 articles. At a rough guess, that's about 3,000 navboxes broke by our reverts)
The old code worked fine on your testcase, but it broke 1400 articles. That's not good.
Why do I think I am better at this? 'cos I built these templates 14 years ago, and have successfully added a lot of new functionality to them and because I can fix the glitches without demolishing the new functionality, as you have repeatedly done.
I am sorry that my /doc at Template:Irish_TD_table_begin#Use_in_navboxes was not clear enough. Do you want to help me out by telling me which bits didn't help? What is unclear about "When used in a navbox, these "Irish TD table" templates use the template {{Is this a Dáil constituency article}} to detect that they are not being used in a constituency article. They adjust their output by supressing elements of the table which are not needed in the navbox, such as references and footnotes, and by linking only the names of TDs. That's the new functionality I added, and which you removed.
And I did not keep you waiting for five days. You will have been warned that you ping had failed, and that I had therefore not been notified. I am sorry that you had this problem (I have made that error too), but please don't blame me for your failure to try again to notify me by some other means.
I am sure that you mean well, but in every case your intervention has made things worse. All I am asking is that if you spot a problem in a template that you don't understand, please either notify me or another experienced template editor rather than reverting 'cos you don't understand how to fix the code. I don't think that's a snarky and acerbic admonishment.
Best wishes, BHG BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:55, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have no warning of a ping failing. Maybe I'm not looking at the right place, but it's not apparent to me.
I'm sorry that you can't see how your responses (here and elsewhere) are landing poorly; I don't know how to explain that to you. -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:34, 30 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I am sorry too, because I do not know how else to explain to you that demolishing new functionality because you don't understand the template code is not a constructive approach.
When I make a ping that fails, I get a notification in the same place as pings to me. I assumed that this is standard behavior by the Wikimedia software. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:42, 2 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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