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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5→Archive 10

Thanks for your help on the Haslingden article

Thanks for your help on saving the Bruce Haslingden article from deletion. I greatly appreciate it. Chris 20:09, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Template:6TeamBracket

Hello, can you add an optional third-place match option for this? Thanks. --Howard the Duck 14:47, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think you can add a 3rd place option for that. The template is not set up to allow it. If you ask someone who contributes to those types of templates regularly, though, I'm sure they would be happy to add the option to that template for you. └Jared┘┌talk┐  14:53, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Maybe an entirely new template like "Template:6TeamBracketwith3rd" or something to that effect? (I've noticed several bracket templates were ripped off like that.) --Howard the Duck 15:46, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Flag calling

Hi! I wonder which template calls the flag Image:South African Olympic Flag.png? Anyway, it seems this image has been superceded by Image:South African Olympic Flag.svg, so a replacement could be useful. Punkmorten 08:10, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

The call {{flagIOC|RSA|1992 Summer}} renders  South Africa. There's no non-Olympic template call for this flag, as I can tell. The image replacement has been made, thanks! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 15:58, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, Template:Country flag IOC alias RSA was the right place to make that change, and Parutakupiu has fixed that already. Andrwsc 17:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

US state abbreviations

Oops! Thanks for correcting that. I always get Michigan and Minnesota mixed up. Both up north somewhere. Being from London, England, though, I might be excused slips in US geography! BTW, I see you have a thread on your talk page about flag icons. You wouldn't know how to do state abbreviations as templates, like the ones at Wikipedia:WikiProject Flag Template? Carcharoth 23:23, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

No worries! I'm not sure what you are looking for, but you can use something like {{flag|Michigan}} to render  Michigan, but if you just want the flag icon, you can use an abbreviation like {{flagicon|USA-MI}} for {{flagicon|USA-MI}}. If you are looking for something as simple as {{MI}}, then we don't have those templates, and to be honest, I'd rather keep it that way. I'm not a huge fan of the set of templates listed at Wikipedia:Inline templates linking country articles, even though I help maintain them, because in many cases readability is compromised. Is it really so onerous to use {{flag|Germany}} instead of {{GER}}, for example? In my editing travels, I've seen instances where the editor has used comments to explain obscure country codes, which totally defeats the purpose! Why write {{DZA}} <!-- Algeria --> when {{flag|Algeria}} does the same thing? Anyway, I digress, but I hope this answers your question about the US states. Andrwsc 23:44, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm looking for a template where I can type the name of the state/country in full, and it will render the abbreviation, but link to the article. ie. CA (cos I can't remember all the abbreviations, but could remember a single "US state postal abbreviations" template name). It would also be handy if I could just type the template name and the parameter California, and it would link to State of California, rather than the disambiguation page California. Part of the reasoning is that this would allow the template to be used to indicate the use of such abbreviations separately from the links directly to State of California (I think). Does that make sense? Carcharoth 23:53, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, bad example. I though California was a dab page, as you changed the links on that baseball page! :-) Carcharoth 23:54, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
Oops. You changed those links from 'State of...' to 'California', not the other way round. I need to look more carefully next time! Carcharoth 23:55, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm not aware of templates like that. (I usually just work on the flag templates). And yeah, California is not a dab page, so my edits were to avoid the redirect. Andrwsc 23:56, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Arsenal FC list of players and the flag issue

About your proposal to include FIFA country codes alongside flags: well, it's a possibility, but I don't know the FIFA country codes, and I don't think to be the only one; and to me flags are more recognizable than FIFA country codes (I would never associate RSA with South Africa, or MDA with Moldova/Moldavia). Anyway, if a consensus on your proposal should emerge, we might consider implementing a template which returns the FIFA country code for the given nationality, in order to make thing easier for the editors. --Angelo 00:05, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I note that all the international football team templates use FIFA codes (e.g. {{RSAf}}, so I assert that editors working on these articles would be somewhat familiar with most codes, and would know where to look for the unfamiliar ones. Andrwsc 00:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I've seen you've already modified the List of U.S. Città di Palermo players article without having found any consensus yet. You could wait to find it before doing that. By the way, I was thinking: what about double nationalities? --Angelo 00:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
In my edit summary, I offered that you can revert if you don't like it. It's trivial to do that, but without making the change, it's more difficult to visualize the end result. Andrwsc 00:11, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
What about using sandboxes? :) --Angelo 00:13, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages :) :) Andrwsc 00:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Mmh... anyway, look at my sandbox, no matter about the content, just look at the design. I tried to fit both flags and full nationality names into the table to some extent. --Angelo 00:27, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, that looks good too! I think I was just reluctant to see the flag icon by itself, so your solution also works to address that issue. I thought the country code might be a good idea since I thought that the "flagicon by itself" format was initially chosen to conserve table space, so I tried to stay within the current column width.
I would also suggest that the flag icon looks best aligned with the country name, so instead of putting {{flagicon|Italy}} in one column and ''Italy'' centered in the next column, to put {{flag|Italy}} left-aligned in a single column. Andrwsc 00:34, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I splitted in two columns just to have the chance of changing text formatting and, in case, abbreviating its name. Anyway I agree the fact both flags and country names should be left-aligned. But what about double nationalities? It's untrue they don't exist, just look at List of F.C. Internazionale Milano players for an example. --Angelo 00:39, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I've just finished updating that one to see what it looks like. I kept the pair of flag+code combinations together on one line, similar to the appearance of just two flags. An alternative would be to put a line break between them, which would keep the flags better aligned, but would make those rows twice as high. Andrwsc 00:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Don't feel offended, but as it is now, the players' rows with double nationalities look awful. And yeah, if we're gonna consider the left-aligned flag+countryname solution, line breaks seems to be the sole existing solution. --Angelo 00:46, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
How about now? Andrwsc 01:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Looks much better, but maybe it's even better to align the "flag" template to the left, possibly including the full country name rather than its FIFA code. --Angelo 01:54, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, I was thinking that if we have room for the full country name, then perhaps the wikilink ought to point to the article for the appropriate national team instead of to the country article. The standard football templates would be used. For example, {{ITAf}} for  Italy, instead of {{flag|ITA}} for  ITA. What do you think? Andrwsc 06:33, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Might be a good idea, even if I don't think the ITAf template has a correct name: there should exist as a unique "football flag" template in its place with the possibility to specify the name as a parameter. I can create it, anyway. --Angelo 15:41, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually, I had started some experimentation with that idea, with the intent of replacing the 900+ templates in Category:National football team templates with at most four templates. There was a short discussion thread about my idea on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Flag Template a few weeks back, but I haven't progresed the idea (working on other stuff in the meantime). Basically, I think it is essential that all flag templates be built on the same infrastucture (using the templates in Category:Country data templates and Category:Country data redirects), so I created Template:fb as a test of that. I've only added support for Italy at the moment, but the idea is to use {{fb|ITA}} or {{fb|Italy}} (take your pick) to replace {{ITAf}}. The result is the same:  Italy — but now the country name is parameterized, which opens up a lot of flexible options for templates built on top. Also, the mechanism handles historical flag variants by default, so you could use {{fb|Italy|1861}} to render  Italy for articles like the 1934 FIFA World Cup, for example. I would also want this generic mechanism to be used to similarly replace hundreds of similar templates for other national sports teams (ice hockey, cricket, rugby, basketball, etc.) The possibility of creating a far more elegant solution to the template overload of today is irresistable. Andrwsc 16:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
"Fb" is a bad choice for the template name, as templates fb start and fb end already exist for giving a support to football-related navigational boxes and that name might generate confusion; better using different names, such as "football flag", "footyflag" or something similar. For the rest, the idea is fully agreeable, and it is what I meant on my previous comment. --Angelo 16:04, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
So we can change it. No big deal. I think I chose an intentionally short name because I didn't want any objections to forcing a replacement of "ITAf" (4 characters) with something like "football flag|Italy" (19 characters). That's how the mess of templates at Wikipedia:Inline templates linking country articles originally got created, independent of the work on the generic {{flag}} template, because certain editors wanted to minimize work for users of these templates. *sigh*. In any case, I've only discussed this idea with two editors (including you), so it's not like the name is cast in stone. Andrwsc 17:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Possibly I'd add a feature to change the shown country name in order to shorten it when it's too long (for instance, to set "Ireland" or "Eire" rather than "Republic of Ireland" as the shown country name, of course keeping the wikilink unchanged). --Angelo 19:16, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I believe that name was chosen for good reason. FIFA refer to the team as "Republic of Ireland" (in full), and if you look at the Ireland national football team disambiguation page, the full name is used there because Ireland national football team refers to a different entity. Andrwsc 20:05, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I know the reason for good (it's just to distinguish with Northern Ireland football team), but that was just an example. There are several country names that might be convenient to shorten in case they don't fit with the table, such as "Democratic Republic of the Congo", "Republic for Ireland" and others. --Angelo 20:41, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, agreed. {{CODf}} renders  DR Congo, and a similar effect is easily managed with a parameter-based template. I think I'd leave Ireland naming alone because the Irish are rather picky about issues like that...  ;) Andrwsc 20:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Ch'Pong

Hey, sorry about that. I had not seen that article before. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Melonflavour (talk • contribs)

No worries, the temptation is there to write your first articles about new things, but once you learn about Wikipedia standards, you'll understand what kind of edits can be kept! Andrwsc 22:50, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Templates CRO and HRV

Hi,

I noticed:

03:23, 10 March 2007 Andrwsc (moved Template:CRO to Template:HRV: The ISO code should be the main location for the template; the IOC and FIFA code can be the redirect)

While I tend to agree with the change, there's an unfortunate side effect - the {{CRO}} transclusion in the infobox at Zoran Primorac no longer shows up.

Can you please check why that happens, and secondly can you change all links from CRO to HRV directly so that we avoid this from happening in the first place?

Thanks. --Joy [shallot] 10:56, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

The problem turned out to be quite unrelated to those two templates, but was instead due to some edits to the internal Template:country flag2, which I have reversed. Andrwsc 16:52, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Lithuania at the 1928 Summer Olympics

Hi,

I put a prod tag on this, but before proceeding to tag other non-notable country/yr/olympics articles wanted to alert you. If you feel I am wrong, and this is contested, I can list the batch at AFD instead. Jd2718 20:07, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Another editor removed the prod since it is part of a series. I'll alert you when I put the batch of them up for afd. Jd2718 20:11, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Sysin

Andrew, I believe you had some problems with Sysin (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) a few weeks ago - join the club! Please see WP:AN/I#Macedonia-related problems and feel free to leave any comments. -- ChrisO 18:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Mildred Fizzell

Hi...I noticed you changed all my edits of Mildred Fizzell incorrectly to Mildred Frizzel. She was my grandmother and I know her name is often misspelled. I have corrected it to the proper spelling, please don't change it back to the incorrect spelling. We're very proud of her accomplishments and we wish these accomplishments be attributed to the proper name. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alisontheice (talk • contribs)

I used the spelling found in the International Olympic Committee medal database, which is our primary source for Olympic articles. Please leave an edit summary when you make changes like this, as it looks like vandalism without any explanation. Also, please provide some additional sources for your grandmother's name if you have them. Andrwsc 03:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Re flag-based templates

Hi Andrwsc,
Thanks for your message. I'm sorry to've appeared to be undoing your work – please be assured that this was not my intention, with my apologies for not making myself more aware of the context.
I was motivated to create the redirection templates as I'd begun trying to use the shorter three-letter templates for flag+country links but couldn't remember or correctly guess a fair number of them. At the same time, I began this to place here and (hopefully) here as a kind of two-pane reference sheet (two pages' worth of listings at the former). (The template is still very much work-in-progress; for example, it's probably even misnamed.)  I'm grateful, though, for your message, as it's allowing me to step back for a moment and think that I agree with you, viz. that multiple redirects encourages unofficial three-letter codes to be thought of as official.
However, rather than (re-)eliminating them as redirects – it may only be a matter of time before other folk unwittingly recreate them again – perhaps they could be recoded to leave a message such as "Please use XXX, the official ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, or, if in a sporting context, YYY or ZZZ [or...], the IOC [or] FIFA [or...] codes."...?  Maybe, though, this too is unwise...?
Meanwhile, I'm also thinking:

(a) To me, "{{flag|X}}" suggests a template that produces only (an icon-sized) flag of X (i.e. per {{flagicon}}), not the flag followed by a link to X. Suggest, therefore, that {{flagicon}} is rendered unnecessary to leave {{flag}} and {{flagcountry}}, e.g.
{{flag|Algeria}}
{{flagcountry|Algeria}}      Algeria
In turn, it might be useful to make {{flagcountry}} defunct as the default output of a more general {{flag+link}} template; I was experimenting with the latter here some time ago. This would yield:
{{flag+link|Algeria}}     Algeria
(b) Renaming Wikipedia:Inline templates linking country articles to (something like) Wikipedia:Inline flag-based templates in order to include "flag" in the title; similarly, renaming Category:Flag templates to Category:Inline flag-based templates, or Category:Flag-based templates (inline) (or...).

Thanks again for your message. For now, I'm going to continue working through this without creating any further redirection templates and preparing to remove the non-ISO/IOC/FIFA/etc variants (which should simplify the code considerably!)  Best wishes, David Kernow (talk) 13:40, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi David, thanks for your thoughtful reply! I think you are spot-on in your recommendation of improved documentation, especially if it leads people to the more readable template calls to replace the often-confusing shortcuts. I had been contemplating some kind of "directory" of the complete set of parameters that could be used with {{flag}}, {{flagicon}}, etc., similar to the idea behind the Wikipedia:Inline templates linking country articles page and your improvements to it, but I haven't got around to that yet.
As for the template names, perhaps I should explain some history. The original templates as developed by User:SEWilco about two years ago had the following effect:
  • {{flagcountry}} (as a shorthand way of writing {{country|flagcountry|...}}), rendered the flag icon followed by the linked country name. The input argument could be the country's name or a country code.
  • {{flagicon}} (as a shorthand way of writing {{country|flagicon|...}}), rendered the flag icon only.
  • {{flag}} (as a shorthand way of writing {{country|flag|...}}), rendered the flag icon followed by the wikilinked ISO country code. For example: DEU.
Now, earlier this year, User:Ligulem started work to clean up these templates, specifically to remove the extra layer of transclusion by the {{country}} template. We also extended the syntax to make historical flag variations possible. At the time, flagcountry and flagicon were used in many thousands of instances, but not many people used flag. I guess there was no compelling reason to have a template that took a full country name as input parameter but output the ISO country code only. Therefore, I took advantage of that to redefine flag to it's current usage:
  • {{flag|Germany}} →  Germany
  • {{flag|GER}} →  GER
  • {{flag|DEU}} →  DEU
  • {{flag|Germany|empire}} →  Germany
So, that's how we got to the current state. Since flagcountry and flagicon were transcluded many thousands of instances, we only made backward-compatible changes to those templates but left the names alone. The flag template name seemed "valuable" to me — as a short, easy-to-use name, it could be widely adopted because of its simplicity — and it wasn't used in many articles at the time. That's why I redefined it to do the most-common thing (i.e. render a flag icon followed by a wikilinked country name). I would certainly be reluctant to redefine flagicon to the flag name at this point, as flagicon is already transcluded in tens of thousands of instances with that name. For better or worse, that's the name people know and use. In fact, it seems that a large number of editors know about flagicon but don't even know about flagcountry. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this structure coded: {{flagicon|Algeria}} [[Algeria]].
Thanks again for the feedback, and we should keep in touch on how to improve the documentation for all these templates. Andrwsc 16:53, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi David, sorry for taking so long to reply to this! First, I had noticed the changes you had made to the deprecated redirects. To be honest, I'd go ahead and speedy delete them — especially the ones you recently created and are currently orphaned. I should mention one other wrinkle - there are a handful of country codes on that list that are used in Commonwealth Games articles, so it's not just an ISO/IOC/FIFA list. Specifically, the unique codes are:
  • Anguilla — ANG
  • Falkland Islands — FAI
  • Guernsey — GUE
  • Isle of Man — IOM
  • Jersey — JER
  • Kiribati — KRI
  • Montserrat — MNT
  • Norfolk Island — NFI
  • Saint Helena — SHE
  • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — SVG
  • Turks and Caicos Islands — TCI
Of those, ANG is problematic because it is the IOC/FIFA code for Angola, so it should take precedence. {{SVG}} has a Wikipedia purpose, so I wouldn't change that. And three of the others don't exist as shortcuts. I only mention this because you had changed {{GUE}}, {{JER}}, {{MNT}} and {{SHE}}.
Second, as for the template names, I'm not so sure we need to change them, even with a bot. I think the most fundamental operation people want is to have the flag icon precede the wikilinked nation name. Therefore, I think it should have the most convenient name. The simple "flag" name works for me because it is so easy to use. Even new editors can grasp the idea of replacing [[Country]] with {{flag|Country}} to add the flag. Perhaps you can consider "flag" as a verb instead of a noun if you think the name is inappropriate for the result! You use the flag template to "flag" a nation's article name.  ;) Andrwsc 18:57, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you very much for your answer about football in 1912. Nice to see, that at least YOU are interested! Doma-w 16:56, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

No worries! It seems as though the folks who patrol new pages are very picky these days about proper references and notability, so I just think you need to make sure that new athlete articles aren't started as stubs without properly asserting the person's notability. Andrwsc 17:00, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

AFD

Hi! I thought you should know about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sudan at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Punkmorten 17:34, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I just replied. Damn. What a mess this will cause if these are all deleted. Andrwsc 17:40, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I just finished my exams, so I have time to write them all up. I started with Ghana. I want to make a contribution here, expanding them, so I can ensure you that none will get deleted. Punkmorten 19:03, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that!!! I'm going to finish a couple more "small ones" myself (working on AHO now) just to prove that they can be expanded beyond stubs. I think that's the crux of the argument here — is it better to have stubs or nothing? I vote for stubs. It will take us a long time to do all the articles in this series, but I think we are proving that it can be done. Andrwsc 19:08, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I wanted to say I don't like the way they're forcing us to expand the articles just for completion and noteworthiness sake, when we (or is it just me?) still haven't discussed properly about the graphical/structural layout of a nation's results on those types of pages. Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, that thought occured to me as I'm working on them! I would say that I don't think I'm being forced into expanding these stubs, but I think it's necessary to make our point. I think completion of a handful of these might be sufficient, and then we can figure out our strategy for layout etc. so that we minimize rework later. Andrwsc 19:18, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a quick question: The "sports" parameter in the infobox is for number of sports like athletics, boxing etc right? High jump and long jump don't count as two sports, do I understand correctly? Punkmorten 19:44, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. We count swimming and diving as distinct sports, however, instead of combining them as one sport ("aquatics") as you sometimes see in offical reports. But high jump and long jump are events in the sport of athletics. Andrwsc 19:54, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

What do we do when the infobox country code doesn't correspond with the contemporary country code? Such as Côte d'Ivoire at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Punkmorten 19:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

We use the current country code for all Games. Country codes weren't standardized until about 1972 (and a few have changed after that), but we want to use codes for all past Games results. Certainly, the Games in the 60s that used pre-standard codes have the greatest deviation (e.g. "GIA" for Japan - Giappone in Italian - for 1960) but it would be quite confusing to show "GIA" for those results on Wikipedia when everybody is familiar with JPN.
I intend to update List of IOC country codes to fully document the historical differences, and I have some extension to {{Infobox Country Olympics}} in mind so that we can add footnotes to the individual articles (e.g. add a footnote that mentions "GIA" to Japan at the 1960 Summer Olympics), so please be patient until I roll those out!  ;) Andrwsc 19:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Participating nations

Thank you for your speedy repair on all those nations!

May I ask you for some help on the English side? :) Doma-w 00:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'm not sure what you mean...? Andrwsc 02:21, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
I do not want to appoint you with work! I only ask you, because I think my English is not good enough to do this. I ave expanded this article: Ice hockey at the 1920 Summer Olympics. And I have added some copyrighted text (you can still find it in the history). I know, that this was not the best idea, but I was so surprised and fascinated about this facts! Now the problem is, that the text had to be rewritten, but in this special case my poor English is not enough.
So maybe you are interested and have fun to do this when ever you want. But of course I will also understand, if you say no! Thanks in advance and :) Doma-w 13:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


Ah, I understand now! You'd like me to help with the prose in some Olympic articles. I certainly fix things up when I see them, but I think I need to spend the bulk of my time getting the basic "foundation" of the articles in place, etc. Andrwsc 15:40, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes. :) This is the point. But I am open to learn. This is the reason why I mainly add or expand only results.
I have added footnotes on 1960, 1964, 1980, and 1988. Hope they are O.K. Thanks! Doma-w 15:59, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Changes

Yes, of course your changes are perfect! I am sorry, your version is the better one.

May I ask you, in a team sport when the squad composes e.g. 22 members, but only e.g. 16 of them already participated. Who many competitors will I add?

Please have a look here: Field hockey at the 1928 Summer Olympics or Field hockey at the 1936 Summer Olympics and here: Afghanistan at the 1936 Summer Olympics. Is this O.K?

Also I would suggest to add the number of competitors of each sport to the nation at the year Olympics. E.g. here: Great Britain and Ireland at the 1908 Summer Olympics, a very long list, but I can not see, who many e.g. swimmers competed. Maybe we can add next to Swimming (28)?

So we can add on the AFG 1936 page Athletics (2) and Hockey (12)? Thanks and :) Doma-w 22:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, I have no clear ideas, especially for "old" Games before good records were kept. The only thing I strongly adhere to is the IOC medal database — if they say a person won a medal, I include them in the list at the top of the article. Andrwsc 00:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I have included all persons, which were listed in the IOC medal database.
Sorry, my question was not clear. My question was not about the medalists.
In the list "participating nations" on the page Field hockey at the 1928 Summer Olympics (not on the page 1928 Summer Olympics) e.g. for Switzerland. The squad was 22 players strong, but only 16 players competed. I have listed all 22, but how many players do I add behind Switzerland in the count of the competitors on this page? 22 or 16?
The same on the page AFG 1936. There were 19 different sportsmen in Berlin, but only 14 of them competed. The hockey squad was 18 members strong, but only 12 played. How many do I add in the infobox? I have shown 14 in 2 sports. Is this O.K.? Doma-w 01:19, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Ah, sorry, I should have read your message more carefully! We don't really have any "standard policy" in the Olympics project for that situation, but my intention with the infobox on individual "Nation at the year Olympics" pages was to include the full size of the delgation. That's why I included parameters for both athletes= and officials=. So, if Afghanistan sent 19 athletes to Berlin, I'd say athletes=19 in the infobox. A single sentence in the "Hockey" subsection of "Results by athlete" could state that 6 of the reserve players didn't see any action. That's my opinion, for what it's worth! Hope this helps, Andrwsc 02:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
I am still pondering. I am not really happy, because when I add 19 athletes then it is impossible to see that only 14 of them competed. In all cases I prefer version, which allow to see every information very quick and clear. I do not want to count the athletes to know how much competed. :) Doma-w 01:44, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Flag Templates

I haven't visited wikipedia for some time, so could not comment in the deletion discussion. I also have my login data not available on this computer, so my signature does not correspond to the IP I am using.

I defend against your accusation of my using "invented" three-letter codes. The codes I used were from the ISO 639-3 standard of the unique languages that are spoken in those regions were possible. Using invented abbreviations would not be of use.

Apart from that, you will notice that Wales, England, Northern Ireland and Scotland also use three-letter templates that are not standardised in ISO 3166-1. This ISO only addresses nations, not regions.

Please answer on User talk:Dingo.

--Dingo 21:35, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

More flag templates

You are welcome to delete my templates but make sure the replacements are created soon; FIBA tournaments are fast approaching and it's so much work adding {{flagicon|USA}} [[United States men's national basketball team|USA]] instead of {{USA-b}}.

If you can't create them can you defer deleting those until September perhaps? Most FIBA tourneys end by that time... on the meantime I'd just create more templates and just substitute them. --Howard the Duck 06:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm here to inform you that ROC doesn't work... --Howard the Duck 06:29, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
It looks like you figured out how to fix it. The only issue is the redirect to Chinese Taipei national basketball team. If you think that's fine, then no problem, but if you want to avoid it, the only way would be to manually code {{flagicon|ROC}} [[Chinese Taipei national basketball team|Republic of China]]. Andrwsc 15:33, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Is there another way to do it besides the redirect? Hmmm... --Howard the Duck 16:00, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
I've got something in mind, but I haven't implemented it yet. if we can live with the redirect for a week or so, then I can update it later. Andrwsc 18:17, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Actually the redirect is rather fine, but if you something else which is a better solution, just implement it. --Howard the Duck 07:39, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
What makes the most sense (to me) is to keep the main article at Chinese Taipei national basketball team, and include all history, even before the "Chinese Taipei" name was used. There would never be content at Republic of China national basketball team (other than potential use as a redirect only). This is precisely the same approach taken for Chinese Taipei national football team. Therefore, the flag of Taiwan would be a "historical flag" for the TPE team, and we would use {{bk|TPE|ROC}} to render  Chinese Taipei. Does this seem ok to you? Andrwsc 08:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
As long as it works I'll be fine with it. --Howard the Duck 08:31, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Reindent - Can you all create a template for women's national basketball teams? --Howard the Duck 08:33, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Another request: can you create/modify templates which will put the flag image to the right and make "Korea" the default displayed name for South Korea? Also for Iran->Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia->Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Macedonia->F.Y.R. of Macedonia? --Howard the Duck 08:29, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, some of those ideas are also on my "to do list"! I've jut created Template:bk-rt for the flag on the right. This is the same naming convention I'm also using for football articles ({{fb}} and {{fb-rt}}) and will also roll out for other sports. As for the names, there are a few I need to fix up (like Korea and FYR Macedonia), and I have an idea in mind on how to implement that (coming soon). However, I am reluctant to use the official long names for Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. We had a discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Olympics a few months ago about this and the consensus was that even though the IOC uses the official long names for a handful of nations, we would continue to use the common names for our Olympic articles and results (e.g. Iran at the 2004 Summer Olympics and  Iran). The long names make table formatting awkward, are don't add much value. Are you ok with this? Andrwsc 15:47, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
KSA's and Iran's short name will be OK but I'm worried about Macedonia since the naming issue. --Howard the Duck 09:12, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
I agree. I have been planning to conform to the naming convention that is used for the football national team. Currently, {{MKDf}} produces  North Macedonia. I can already reproduce the same effect with {{fb|MKD|name=FYR Macedonia}}, but I'd like to make the "name=" part transparent and automatic. I have an idea of how to do that (generically for all the sport templates), and will roll that out soon. This will also be used for some other nations that have similar naming differences. In the meantime, if you are concerned about the display string for the articles you are currently working on, please feel free to use the "name=" parameter . Andrwsc 17:03, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Olympic stubs

Hi Andrewsc, sorry for not replying at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sudan at the 1968 Summer Olympics earlier. Since that has now closed I will reply here. To answer your question about what is needed, my short answer is "more". An example of the minimum I would like to see can be seen at this stub I created recently - Yarroweyah, Victoria. If I could not find at least this much sourced material, I would not have created the article. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with leaving redlinks alone until a decent article can be written and creating substubs for the sake of merely eliminating redlinks is harmful to the Wikipedia project. Just so you are aware that I was not just picking on the Olympic articles; see here for my similar concerns to some rail line articles - Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board/Archive 26#New railway line articles. Anyway, it seems I am in a minority and your stubs are safe. My views have not changed, however, and we will just have to agree to disagree. Good luck to you and the other members of the Olympic WikiProject. Cheers, Mattinbgn/ talk 07:39, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, Matt. Do you have any specific ideas of what "more" is needed for those Olympic pages? I think the difference between your stub example (which I like) and those Olympic stubs is that I put most of the potential information inside the infobox and did not repeat it as prose text. Before I developed the {{Infobox Country Olympics}} template, those stubs tended to have longer prose introductions, stating things like the number of times the country had appeared at the Games, when the first appearance was, any medals won, name of the Olympic committee, IOC country code used for results, number of athletes sent to the Games (if number is available), etc. In several cases, some of that information was "unstable", so I pulled it out of the prose intro and put it into the infobox for maintenance reasons (e.g. one edit to update a nation's pages instead of twenty). If I had left that prose alone (so that it repeated infobox data), would that have been sufficient for "more"? Thanks again for your feedback, Andrwsc 18:14, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Most recent page layout for results

Hi, Andrwsc! I've decided to create the pages for the trampoline events at the 2004 Summer Olympics (Jared indirectly showed me that there isn't yet any event-specific results pages for this sport! It's all condensed into Gymnastics at the 2004 Summer Olympics). I wanted to ask you to show me examples of the latest, most recent page layouts, so that I can see if there are new templates being used (e.g. in medalists tables, etc). Thanks! Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:16, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Parutakupui! My most recent Olympic edits have been to "match" events like judo and taekwondo (with fencing planned next), but those use tournament brackets to describe the results. I would say that the weightlifting pages are probably the most current example of a tabular results page. Hope this helps, Andrwsc 22:20, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, I'll take a look at those pages and start working. Thanks again ;) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 22:25, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't realize that there were already trampoline pages. They just had a capital T in the title, so it didn't show up on the Gymnastics 04 template. I've moved the pages to the lowercase t, the correct way to title the event. I just wanted to make sure you knew those pages existed! └Jared┘┌t┐  22:56, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
(On a side note, that wasn't even the reason why they didn't show up on the template. It turns out, I had the total wrong name for the events in the template!) └Jared┘┌t┐  22:58, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Gladly, I realized that before going on creating duplicates pages! They were just "lost" without any navigation box to link them to the parent and sister articles. Now that a whole bunch of work is done, I'm gonna update the layout then.
(Yes, Jared I also noticed the bad link too and was also about to change it :P) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 23:17, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
I took a crack at editing Gymnastics at the 2004 Summer Olympics - Men's trampoline. The table seems sort of messy, though, so if you have any suggestions as to how to lessen the clutter, please suggest or edit away! └Jared┘┌t┐  00:02, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to improve that. It certainly follows all our "unofficial standards". My only comments would be whether or not we think all the individual judges scores are needed (or just the total from each segment of the competition), and whether or not we should list (and wikilink) the judges names. Would being an Olympic judge satisfy the criteria for WP:BLP? Could articles be created someday for those people? Andrwsc 18:07, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, don't see the need to name the judges just because the data was available. For the artistic gymnastics event pages I've been only stating the judge's nationality right on top of the table (example: Gymnastics at the 2004 Summer Olympics - Men's floor). But as for the the individual judge scores, I think it's best to add them, if available. Sometimes there are total score ties, but may have distinct individual scores for each of the judges... Parutakupiu talk || contribs 18:16, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Hey, those look really good! I like the idea of decoupling these individual finals from the common qualification round on a separate page. I'd suggest that we make that linkage more obvious, perhaps by adding this:
==Results==
===Qualification===
{{Main|Gymnastics at the 2004 Summer Olympics - Men's artistic qualification}}
Eighty-nine gymnasts competed in the floor exercises event in the artisitic gymnastics qualification round on [[August 14]].
The top eight gymnasts advanced to the final.

===Final===
Alternately, we could include a complete list of all floor exercise (only) results. Or do you think it's better to keep them seperate? Andrwsc 18:27, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
(Unindent) Yes, I was planning to separate the qualification results from the eight distinct finals, even though the qualification round served all of the apparatus finals. I was thinking of doing a single page with the men's and women's qualification results, and all event pages linking to it. This way we have all qualifying results condensed into an unique page and avoid repeating data for each individual event page(apparatus-specific scores and as part of all-around competition). What do you think? If you come up with a better idea, I'll follow it!
I like that linkage, more obvious than a inline link on the lead! ;) Parutakupiu talk || contribs 19:03, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I like your approach (with the extra sub-section that I suggested above). Good work — the gymnastics pages sorely needed our "cleanup treatment".  ;) Andrwsc 19:06, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Template:Rugby squad player

I saw your edit to the template above and wonder if you can help with a technical problem. A decision was made some time ago that neither the flag of the Republic of Ireland nor the flag of Northern Ireland would be used to represent Irish rugby union because it is organised on an all-Ireland basis. It was agreed that a shamrock would be used instead of a flag; however this template didn't allow for this.

Now the natvar edit that you made to the template seems to open up the possibility of solving this issue. The flag I need to use has the following code {{flag|Ireland|rugby}} and it needs to go into the following codeline somewhere :-

{{rugby squad player | nat=Ireland| pos=CT | name=[[Gordan D'Arcy]] | region=}}

If you could tell me what code should replace nat=Ireland to bring up a shamrock, I'd be grateful.GordyB 20:20, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

It should work with this:
{{rugby squad player |nat=Ireland |natvar=rugby |pos=CE |name=[[Gordan D'Arcy]]}}
Hope this helps, Andrwsc 20:35, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Irish elections

I see you altered the Template:Irish elections, I tried that a while ago on Template:Northern_Ireland_elections and the edit was reverted, you can see the discussion here.--padraig3uk 16:55, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, if someone reverts it, I won't take offense. I was just trying to find a more aesthetically pleasing compromise. The use of multiple identical flag icons on each heading line was ugly, IMO. Better to have a single larger flag image than that. Andrwsc 18:22, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Flags

I left a comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football about the flag template changes. On the surface, I agree that it is much simpler; but, I do not know what adverse impact this could have on the wikipedia servers. The compute cycles to lookup a template and replace it with static content are different than the compute cycles to lookup a template, pass a parameter, and compute the non-static content. Intuition tells me that the {{fb}} template is more intensive on the server, so, I think it might be good to get a technical guy involved on this discussion, since the flag templates are so ubiquitous. Regards. Neier 08:28, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Flag borders

Hi Andrwsc. Please stop making mass edits to the flag templates. The reason they use the pre-bordered versions is to allow consistently-looking lists, but it doesn't work using the border feature, as the border adds an additional pixel to either side of the the image. This makes lists like the ones for town twinnings look horrible as some images are sized 20px and some 22px. See e.g. Odense_Municipality#Twin_cities_and_towns. --Valentinian T / C 20:26, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, none of them should be 20px as the standard size for flag icons is 22x20px (as coded in the {{flag}} etc. templates), but I see your concern. My motivation for using the MediaWiki border syntax is that the "(bordered)" versions of SVG flag images are rather inconsistent with respect to border width and color, so I really liked the idea of standardizing on a common, aesthetically pleasing border. I will figure out another way of doing it without causing misalignment between different flags. Andrwsc 20:35, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
You're right about the size. What I meant was 22 px. vs. 22+1+1. In the old "flagicons" system, many of the images were hard to see if they contained large portions of white in them. To solve that, people began adding borders randomly, thus garbling the lists. Others fixed this issue by introducing the pre-bordered images. I know they look clunky but it was the best solution some of us could come up with at the time. My only concern is to avoid seeing the old mess of garbled lists. I can't think of any other alternative to the old system than forcing a border on every single flag template. Whatever you do, please make the finished templates look consistent and be aware that edits like these are probably very heavy on the servers. Regards. Valentinian T / C 20:51, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm well aware of this history and current situation, having done a significant amount of work for Wikipedia:WikiProject Flag Template for the past six months or so. I certainly want to find a solution that makes all the icons the same size, but I also want to find an elegant, consistent way to add borders to flags that need them, and deprecate the "(bordered)" variants as unnecessary. Stay tuned!  ;) Andrwsc 21:00, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
I will ;) And I'm fully aware that the old system wasn't perfect and that the pre-bordered images aren't loved everywhere. The more I think about it, a forced mediawiki border might be the easiest way to go. Happy editing. Valentinian T / C 21:05, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Why not just add a border for every country? I've just done it to Template:Country data Clipperton Island. This looks fine:  Clipperton Island. Chanheigeorge 01:04, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
Well, yeah, that is certainly one option, and one that I have already explored with the Olympic articles. They use a different flag template system, and I have modified it to use the border for all flags. See 2004 Summer Olympics#Participating NOCs to see a list with every flag bordered. I had been planning to post a message to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Flag Template soon to get some opinions before I update {{flagicon}} and friends to have this same behaviour. Andrwsc 04:01, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
STOP! Having grey borders around all flagicons looks like ass. I'm going to revert it if I can find the root cause of the borders... PatrikR 20:05, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Having irregular borders and uneven icon sizes looks worse than "ass". Andrwsc 20:17, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
You are of course entitled to your opinion even though it is wrong. :) But, this border change is a major edit which affects flag icons on literally thousands of pages, has this change been voted on anywhere, or did you just unilaterally decide to do this? - PatrikR 20:32, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
There was a small discussion and consensus for the change at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Flag Template. I fully understand the scope of this change, and was hoping to see some more discussion for the past week before I went ahead with the change, but there were no dissenters. Please remain civil. Andrwsc 20:35, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
I resent that. The :) emoticon indicates that the previous statement is not to be taken seriously. No incivility here. PatrikR 21:10, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Template:Country data Western Sahara

Hi. You have reverted the most accurate version to the POV version before protecting the Template:Country data Western Sahara. Can you give a reason for reverting to the version that contains a flag for a territory that has no flag. Thanks.--A Jalil 20:41, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I protected the version that was stable for months before your edit war started in the last 24 hours. Also, these templates are used for flag icons, and that map image is not a flag. Andrwsc 20:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
The territory of Western Sahara is not a country and has no flag. The fact that that version was there for months does not mean it is correct, actually the opposite. You could have looked at the discussion going over the subject to see that only one user, Koavf who has been blocked for months for disruptive pro-Polisario agit-prop, is behind the edit war. Is it because it is flag template, there should be a flag even if that goes against Wikipedia's NPOV policy. The french Wiki uses a map instead of a flag for WS. I invite you to rethink which version is then most appropriate.--A Jalil 20:56, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Template:Country data Ireland

I notice that you're dab-ing pages that uses Template:Country data Ireland and Template:Country data Republic of Ireland. Is Template:Country data Ireland supposed to serve the whole island of Ireland instead of the state of Republic of Ireland? Right now the link goes to the island, but the default flag is the Republic of Ireland flag, so this arrangement looks a bit strange to me. Chanheigeorge 00:56, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

I am working on a generic template mechanism for national sports teams (see some discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football), and I need to have distinct templates for teams that represent just the Republic of Ireland (e.g. football) vs. those that represent the whole island (e.g. rugby, cricket). So yeah, the intent will be to use Template:Country data Republic of Ireland, and it's "shortcut" of Template:Country data IRL for the former, and Template:Country data Ireland and it's shortcut of Template:Country data IRE for the latter. I will be updating the documentation pages for these soon. Andrwsc 03:57, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
I understand the problem, as the term "Ireland" may mean the whole island or just the republic. The problem is that both meanings are used quite often, although I would think that somebody who calls Republic of Ireland or  Ireland would more likely refer to the republic, since there's really no official flag for Ireland per se. As for sports teams, while it's common to use the term "Republic of Ireland" for football, and the term "Ireland" refers to the whole island in rugby and cricket, I'm not sure about the other sports. For example, "Ireland" in the Olympics refers to the republic. So this is a really complicated issue. Chanheigeorge 06:45, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks.GordyB 08:43, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Leinster Rugby is the one I can't get to work. Could you have a look please?GordyB 21:02, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you are specifically referring to, but if you are trying to change all the flag icons in the team squad section, then use the "natvar" parameter of {{rugby squad player}}. For example, use |nat=Ireland |natvar=rugby for those players. Hope this helps, Andrwsc 21:18, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Checkuser Request

Just to remind you, when filing a case at WP:RFCU, you need to create the case about the puppetmaster, NOT the sockpuppet. This helps keep track of all known sockpuppets from one sockpuppeteer. Thanks for your help. :) GrooveDog 21:43, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Ah, sorry about that! That was my first checkuser request, and it wasn't obvious from the instructions that I should have done it that way. Anyway, I hope there is "no foul, no harm" here! Andrwsc 21:47, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Request

Could you please give your comment at the discussion at Talk:List of political parties by country. Electionworld Talk? 18:57, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Some doubts

Hey, Andrwsc! ;) After reading your latest reply on the project talk page, I've reviewed the 2004 gymnastics pages I created and some doubts emerged. Do you think the rhythmics and trampoline results should keep their current layout or would it be better to sacrifice some info, such as the judges scores (trampoline) and the technical/artistic/execution marks (rhythmics) so that the results can be merged into one table (qualifier + final), following your idea? I don't know... I'm not very fond of deleting content which doesn't seem superfluous to me. What do you think? Parutakupiu talk || contribs 16:51, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

You know, I think they're fine as is. I think it becomes a problem when you have to repeat 64 or 72 names more than once in those "big" events, but for a list of about 10-20 gymnasts, it's not so bad. I think the only thing I would change is the color coding to represent gymnasts who advanced to the finals. I prefer to use Q in a table column next to the scores or times. Cheers! Andrwsc 18:29, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Addition in Country data Guadeloupe

Could you please add a "| sport = {{{sport|}}}" row in the Country data Guadeloupe template in order to feature support for Fb. Notably, this should be used in List of F.C. Internazionale Milano players for Jocelyn Angloma. Thank you. --Angelo 14:56, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Done. Andrwsc 15:57, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Hi Andrwsc. Could you take a look at my request on the talk page of that template? Thanks. —MC 18:14, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Responded on that talk page. Andrwsc 19:21, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Could you do the same for Réunion Image:Flag of Réunion (Local).svg and French Guiana Image:Flag of French Guiana.svg? These are for the football templates which already use them… —MC 21:46, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Ahem. Just wanted to point out that the "flag of French Guiana" is a flag used by supporters of independence. This does not comply with NPOV. The status of the other flag should be checked as well. Valentinian T / C 00:01, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

The output of {{flag|French Guiana}} still renders  French Guiana. I have only added the local variant per request. The independence image is already used on several articles, mostly through Template:GUFf, which asserts that it represents their football team. If that it incorrect, I would recommend you make changes there! I have not changed any POV in any article; my only concern is through the template implementation of these flags, so that editors can use {{flag}} for consistent rendering instead of [[Image:Flag of French Guiana.svg|22x20px]]. I think your issue is with editors on pages that use that flag, not with me. I will certainly remove the flag from Template:Country data French Guiana if the flag becomes unused in icon context, but while there are articles that use that image as an icon, it should remain under the flag template system. Andrwsc 00:08, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
It sounds reassuring that {{Flag}} links to the standard image of the Tricolore. I've removed the other flag from the {{GUFf}} template. As long as this image isn't prominently displayed on the French Wikipedia like the other région insignia, and as long as Flag of French Guiana describes it as a pro-independence flag, I'd rather err on the side of caution. FOTW also seems to describe this is a political flag: [1] Regards. Valentinian T / C 00:30, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, the only reason I honored that request to edit Template:Country data French Guiana was because I assumed the football team usage of that flag was accurate, which I now doubt. I guess all those French region flag templates are protected for a reason! Andrwsc 00:33, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I just noticed this page on FOTW: [2] The Tricolore is the only official flag of French Guiana, but the région authorities use a white flag with the région's logo. I also find it interesting that the other image isn't displayed at all on fr:Guyane (France). I've also begun removing it from the Italian Wikipedia where it featured prominently as well. Regards. Valentinian T / C 00:38, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
I've removed it from the country data template, and it looks like we've just removed it from all the articles where it shouldn't be used! Andrwsc 00:53, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Excellent. I guess it would be an idea to get the other image renamed on Commons to avoid any further confusion. Valentinian T / C 01:06, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
You know, I think people see flags for some of France's overseas territories (e.g. French Polynesia and Martinique) and they natually assume — or want — flags for all of them. Anyway, I found one page where I think the region/local flags actually make sense. Outremer Champions Cup lists the results of a football tournament apparently held between clubs from France's territories, so it would be goofy to use the French tricolor for all of them. Anyway, thanks for your feedback and help! Andrwsc 02:44, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Glad I was able to help :) Actually, I looked for such a series of images a few years ago, and back then I noticed that French Guiana was the odd man out in this respect. The région flag was introduced later, but I don't know how much it is used there. It does feature prominently on the région's official webpage, though.[3] The (poor-equality) website of the relevant departement doesn't use any flag at all. I guess editors were just fooled by the name this file uses on commons, so I think it would be better to have it renamed to something less clear-cut. I agree that the local flags make sense on the page you indicated. I did a little more checking on the French Wikipedia and neither fr:Guyane (France) nor the articles in fr:Catégorie:Sport en Guyane use the other image. Happy editing. Valentinian T / C 12:32, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Flag borders - part 2

I've noticed that you are wandering around the wiki replacing alternate PNGs with wiki syntax for borders, but you aren't actually specifying the borders themselves. For example, compare these two:

You will see that the border is absent. Would you please review your changes and restore the original "look" in the templates? -- Scjessey 16:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The border is no longer black. Unfortunately, userboxes tend to have coloured backgrounds instead of page white, so image borders get lost. For pretty much every other instance, the border generated by the image syntax is superior. (See this vs. this.) We're trying to deprecate the alternate "(bordered)" SVG images, so I'd rather find another solution. Andrwsc 16:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry but that just doesn't make any sense. There is no reason at all why flag usage on userboxes should be standardized in the manner you describe. You have made changes to userbox templates without even discussing them on their relevant talk pages. Please stop making such changes until a consensus has been reached on each individual userbox template before you edit them according to your personal whim. Meanwhile, I shall be reverting any changes you make to userbox templates I am using. -- Scjessey 17:15, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Well, you'll have to figure out an alternate solution once Image:Flag of England (bordered).svg is deleted, but I guess you can revert for now if that helps you. Please refrain from reverting any changes to userbox templates you are not using. Andrwsc 17:26, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
And why should Image:Flag of England (bordered).svg be deleted? -- Scjessey 17:37, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Because those alternate SVG versions were kludges created because of the absence of the border image syntax. Now that MediaWiki supports image borders properly, the alternate versions are not needed. The new syntax resolves problems with respect to inconsistent (or missing) bordered versions for flags of different nations. It also solves problems related to the border scaling to ugly sizes when larger image sizes are used (since the border is part of the SVG image). Andrwsc 17:43, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
The improvement in MediaWiki's image abilities has no bearing on whether or not the SVG resource should be deleted. I agree that the new syntax is preferable; however, your edit results in a significant visual change that ruins the appearance of the template. If you are going to make changes to the syntax, ensure the modified template looks the same as it did before the changes. If you are unable to replicate the existing style, you should discard your changes. -- Scjessey 17:51, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
This discussion will be helpful when I propose deletion of those images. Consensus will mandate whether they are deleted or not. Andrwsc 17:53, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
That is very true, but you must still be aware of the consequences of deleting the image and editing the userboxes. You should make sure all usage of the image and templates has been properly taken care of before removing the original resource. -- Scjessey 17:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Um, yeah. That's precisely what I'm doing now! Andrwsc 18:01, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
Um, no. The changes you are making now result in a change to the visual appearance of the templates (vanishing black borders). If you can ensure that the template LOOKS the same as it did before your change, there is no problem. -- Scjessey 18:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Butts in: Is there a way to "thicken" the borders? --Howard the Duck 13:14, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Not with the MediaWiki image syntax. You'd have to create an alternate SVG version, I suppose, or use a similar technique as in Template:border. Andrwsc 15:40, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

College Baseball Project

Hello, I noticed that you have edited a College baseball related article. You may be interested to know that there is a college baseball WikiProject which you can join if you like. We would love to have you!

Pantelimon follow-up

Hi! Thanks for clearing up multiple Olympic-related pages! I'm curious about the official result list for the women's high jump though.

I understand that the IAAF result lists may not be trustworthy (i.e. DQ for USA in the 4x400 m...). But it does show the following data: 

1   Yelesina Yelena           RUS  2.01 (SB) 
2   Storbeck-Cloete Hestrie   RSA  2.01 (SB) 
3   Bergqvist Kajsa           SWE  1.99   
3   Musunoiu-Pantelimon Oana  ROM  1.99 (PB)

And, when examining the height-by-height results, there is no difference between the two athletes whatsoever. 

Athlete                    185  190  193  196  199  201  203
Bergqvist Kajsa            o    o    o    o    xo   x-   xx
Musunoiu-Pantelimon Oana   o    o    o    o    xo   xxx

If the above figures are displayed correctly in the IAAF result list, there is no way that anyone could have won or lost on countback.

The IAAF profile for Oana Pantelimon still shows a third place finish in Sydney 2000 (although that might not be fully reliable. Look, for instance at the preposterous IAAF profile for Stian Andersen).

Could you tell me the url for the official (IOC?) result list? We should compare the two. And by the way let's keep the discussion on this page. Punkmorten 22:30, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

My two primary references for all Olympic-related results are the IOC medal database here and the official reports from each Games in PDF format here. In the case of the women's high jump in 2000, both of these sources agree with each other that only a single bronze medal was awarded (to Bergqvist), so that's why I made the changes. I have been going through all the Games adding up the per-sport medal counts we have on Wikipedia, comparing to the official totals to find any discrepancies, and this was one I found.
As for the 4x400 relay, the IOC database still showed USA with the gold, not NGR, so I googled around to try to see if the IOC database or the IAAF database was more current. I found the references to the CAS ruling that seemed to support the IOC list with USA-NGR-JAM as official, so that's why I made those changes.
Hope this helps, Andrwsc 22:50, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The Sydney results PDF perfectly matches the IAAF result in terms of each attempt ("x" and "o"), but it also clearly shows Pantelimon as ranked 4th instead of a tie for 3rd. There are tie rankings further down that list at 9th and 11th, so some tie-breaking method had to have been used between Pantelimon and Bergqvist. I have no answer to that, but I still think our best approach is to align with the IOC/SOCOG results as our primary sources. Andrwsc 22:57, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I noticed the same thing, I will investigate the issue. So I'll get back to you over the weekend, thanks for the link. Punkmorten 23:01, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


Hi again. I eventually contacted mr. A. Lennart Julin, head of the statistics department in Sweden and "respected track and field statistician"[4] Saying the IOC report is "wrong" on this issue, Julin directed me to the news item written by the Swedish Athletics Association at the time, which says that Bergqvist and Pantelimon shared the bronze medal. The same is said in this Associated Press report. Many circumstances here indicate that the IOC report is, in fact, wrong, don't you agree? Punkmorten 20:45, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Wow, that's some persistence you have! As always, I think the best approach is to quote both sets of sources and explain the inconsistency. There will be a non-trivial "ripple effect" here, as all the medal counts on several pages assume that there was only one bronze, so that set of explanatory footnotes will need to be placed on all those pages. Good work! Andrwsc 20:51, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Valencian Community flag

Hi, I saw you reverted the flag back to the 1:2 proportions. If you have any factual source for this change, I would love if you could show it to us in the Talk:Valencian Community#The flag section, because it has been a quite hard discussion before leaving the 2:3 proportions one.

Thanks, --Maurice27 00:35, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, I noticed that there were two flag variants widely used on many pages, and the comments on Image talk:Flag of Valencia Autonomo community.png concluded that "Let's then, please, change the actual flag in wikipedia, which is wrong.". Therefore, I assumed that the version currently installed on the main article was wrong, so I changed it to the other one. If that was incorrect, feel free to change it back, but please change all instances. It was plainly goofy to see two different flag versions in use, depending on what page you looked at. Andrwsc 02:53, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
During discussions, we finally agreed that the 2:3 proportions one was the only one to have an official source. Thanks for your understanding. --Maurice27 07:40, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
Well, don't just blindly undo all my edits. Please take a close look at what you are doing. For example, Spain national under-21 football team originally had both flags used in the article. I made them all the same. Since you just seem to be hitting the "revert" button on my edits, you've made that article show both the "good" and "bad" flags once again! I take great care in my edits, and I don't like to see mistakes re-introduced into those articles. If you are going to use a different flag, please do it properly. Thanks for your understanding. Andrwsc 08:19, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

ooops... Sorry about that... :( --Maurice27 09:24, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok! Sorry if I was a bit annoying. Anyway, I finished an AWB run replacing all the flag instances, so once the servers catch up, we should be able to confirm that every' instance has been changed to use the 2:3 PNG file. Andrwsc 09:26, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Those are great news. thanks a lot for your time! --Maurice27 17:20, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Templates

I'm going to need a template for the men and women's handball events at the 2004 Olympics. I have these 2 pages up: Men and Women. It's the template that goes in the upper right hand corner that helps the reader get from one event to the other. Thanks. Perakhantu 21:09, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

How about Template:HandballAt2004SummerOlympics, which is modeled precisely after the football template. I guess it implies the same article structure and naming conventions. Andrwsc 21:16, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Thank you very much, although, I didn't use "tournament" per se in the template. I just changed it to Men's handball. Thanks again! Perakhantu 22:13, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you again, but I'm going to need a template for the 2004 baseketball pages now. I would be doing this myself, but I tried going through the help section of wikipedia on how to create templates, and they ARE NOT that clear or helpful. Anyway, thanks again. Perakhantu 23:17, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

I just made a copy of football and changed "foot" to "basket".  ;) See Template:BasketballAt2004SummerOlympics. Andrwsc 23:24, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Country data N Ireland

I see you added an alternative to the template, could you give a code example on how to use this.--padraig3uk 22:02, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean my edit from today? That's not a new variant - it's an internal parameter to be used by templates such as Template:fb to render links to national football teams. e.g. {{fb|Northern Ireland}} produces  Northern Ireland. This has actually been working for a while for most nations, but I'm modifying the internal mechanism for the ones that don't work, and that caused the modification of a majority of country_data templates to add the "altlink" argument today. Andrwsc 22:08, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
If these exist then why can't the {{NIR}} be altered, as this {{fb|Northern Ireland}} could be used for sport uses.--padraig3uk 22:28, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
Because football ≠ all sports. Andrwsc 22:29, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
If this was altered to {{sp|Northern Ireland}} then there would be no need for the NIR template.--padraig3uk 22:38, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
There is no Template:sp. I don't understand your point. Andrwsc 22:41, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
My point is that most edit disputes on templates use the NIR template, If the fb template was used in sports articles for the Ulster Banner, then the NIR template can be altered to either the Union Flag or none.--padraig3uk 23:05, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
But that makes no sense whatsoever. The {{fb}} template creates wikilinks to the appropriate national football team article. Why would you use a template that creates a link to Northern Ireland national football team for non-football references? Andrwsc 23:08, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Flags of Ireland

Andrwsc, with all due repsect, please don't change the flag template for Ireland unless you really know what you're doing. The use of flags and symbols are very sensetive issues for people from both communities. Please approach it with care. For example, you made an edit so that "Saint Patrick Saltire" was the flag of "Ireland national football team (IFA)". To begin with there is no Irish national football team. There are two teams: the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. They are disbarred by FIFA regulations from forming a single team to represent the whole island. The IFA, which you bracketed after "Ireland national football team", is the football association for Northern Ireland. Neither of these teams are represented by Saint Patricks Saltire - quire a bewildering flag to use as it is a defunct 18th century flag that represents nobody today, but carries vague impressions of ascendancy, to which neither of the two major communitiese in Ireland today belonged. --sony-youthpléigh 09:19, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Ah! with apologies - I see where the reference was to now. Sorry, wasn't thinking historically. --sony-youthpléigh 09:37, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Those changes I made were 100% compatible replacements for existing usage. In this case, Template:IREf is being replaced by {{fb|IRE}}. Trust me, I know exactly what I'm doing here! Andrwsc 13:23, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Apologies all over again. Next time I might even look before I leap! --sony-youthpléigh 13:27, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
No worries! I think edges are frayed all around from the whole NI flag thing. You'll see in the previous message thread that User:Padraig3uk also jumped soon after I made some internal changes to Template:Country data Northern Ireland to support it's football team.... Andrwsc 13:45, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Nice work with Template:Country_data_Ireland. Thanks! --sony-youthpléigh 01:44, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! You may have noticed the extra stuff in there; it is used to support national team templates. Right now, Template:Country data Ireland supports the all-Ireland teams, such as:
  • Football (old team): {{fb|Ireland}} →  Ireland
  • Cricket: {{cr|Ireland}} →  Ireland
  • Rugby: {{ru|Ireland}} →  Ireland
The other side of that coin is that Template:Country data Republic of Ireland supports templates for sports teams specific to that nation, such as:
Therefore, as you can imagine, I'm keeping a close eye on the Talk:Republic of Ireland discussion about page renaming. I might have some work to do if things change.... Andrwsc 03:51, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Flag of Royalist France

Hi Andrew

Would you mind taking a peek at the article about Napoleon I of France? It looks like the flag border doesn't work for the flag of the former Kingdom of France. Best. Valentinian T / C 09:32, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

The problem was that Template:Country data Royalist France was malformed, consisting of a rendered flag icon instead of the standard template code. I have deleted it, since it duplicates the behaviour of the existing {{flagicon|France|royal}}. Hope this helps! Andrwsc 13:53, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Good job

Nice work on Olympic Games, trying to incorporate that "new" material yet keeping the blatant POV overtones out of it. Andrwsc 21:59, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm trying hard to work with Nipsonanomhmata. He does have some good points about Zappas not getting much credit for his Olympic revival efforts, but his preferred method of working (that is to say, blasting everyone who isn't Zappas with belittlements and ridicule) isn't much fun. Trying to keep things to the generally-accepted consensus (which even Young, Nipsonanomhmata's favorite author, agrees with) is tough. -- Jonel (Speak to me) 22:11, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Olympic categories

Can you please help me with this user: User:KRBN. I do not have the time now. He destroyed same cats and I have reverted and asked the user on this talk page to stop it, but he has changed all again. You can see the cats on my contributions-list. The are all again out of the row. Thank you Doma-w 12:59, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

As you are an anmin I will once more ask you for same help to stop the vandalism of same sport and Olympic categories. I have reverted all the wrong categories (same of them twice!), but the same user destroyed it again. E.g. Category:Kazakhstani sport shooters So what can I do? Thanks in advance! Doma-w 15:59, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't see "vandalism" here, just a content dispute. I'm not sure I see what the problem is - Category:Olympic competitors for Kazakhstan is a subcategory of Category:Kazakhstani sportspeople...? Andrwsc 16:04, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
From all countries the e.g. sport shooters are only categorized as "Sport shooters by nationality" and "Nation sportspeople". So, why this will differ (in this case) for Kazakhstan? If the cat:Kazakhstani sport shooters is also included into cat:Olympic competitors for Kazakhstan all sport shooters from Kazakhstan had to be Olympic competitors! Well, maybe now all of them are Olympic competitors, but a cat is not only for the moment.
Also you can see, that e.g. all categories included in Category:British sportspeople does not include Category:Olympic competitors for Great Britain. And this is right! Because e.g. not all Category:British equestrians are Olympic competitors. But we have a special cat Category:Olympic equestrians of Great Britain. So there is no confusion.
I only tried to clean all these sport and Olympic cats to give them the same style. I hope my English is good enough to explain what I mean. Please be patient. Thank you! Doma-w 16:42, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:RankedMedalTable

What's the point of your revert there? [5] The names of some nations in Summer Olympics medal count are unnecessarily broken into two lines which is hardly desirable. Why should that column be so narrow on purpose? -- Matthead discuß!     O       04:01, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

None of the names are broken into more than one line, so I'm not sure what you are referring to. What browser are you using? What display size? On 1024x768 with IE6, it looks fine. The CSS width parameter is not the exact size to be used, it is the minimum. Therefore, it will stretch wider if necessary. 12 em spaces is more than enough on the hundreds of pages on which I have used this template. Andrwsc 04:04, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
In Firefox 2.0.0.4 at 1152x864, the table uses only half of the screen width, it is narrower than the Olympics medal counts template at the bottom. The footnote after East Germany (GDR) is in a separate line, longer names like Netherlands Antilles (AHO) are also in two lines. The Nation column is not much wider than Gold and Silver combined, and narrower than all three medal colums, according to 12 < 4.5 + 4.5 + 4.5. The minimum width should be set for the longest name, which seems to be Independent Olympic Participants (IOP). -- Matthead discuß!     O       04:25, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, that's interesting to see that Firefox and IE treat the width parameter differently. I will look into this! Thanks, Andrwsc 04:41, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Let's get this in perspective

Look who started the edit war on the original article here. The same editor! So the article was protected, and it went to the talk page. Is there consensus for inclusion of the flag and coat-of-arms on the talk page? Absolutely not. But rather than work towards consensus he repeatedly tried to add it to the template, shattering 3RR in the process. Nice to see I get the same warning as the person who did break the rules and ignored the lack of consensus and caused the edit war in the first place. Consistent, much? No Values 21:37, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't care who started the edit warring - I just want it to stop. From the edit history, you are both equally responsible for the constant thrashing of that template contents. Andrwsc 21:41, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
As above - I wasn't the one who ignored consensus or shattered 3RR. No Values 21:51, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
There is no current consensus, so that's not an issue. I request that you work to find consensus. As for 3RR, I didn't block anybody, so there's nothing to be upset about. I dropped warning notices on all the talk pages before 3RR was broached. And gaming the system by timing your reverts to 24 hour windows is not acceptable either. Please re-read WP:3RR for an explanation of this. Andrwsc 21:56, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Northern Ireland infobox

Can you remove the coatof arms and Ulster Banner from the template please, there is no consensus for these to be included. I thought that the whole idea to put the infobox in a seperate template was so it could be protected to prevent this sort of edit war--padraig3uk 22:17, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

There's no consensus either for them not to be included. My desire is for a real and lasting consensus to be formed, and the only way for that to happen is through open-minded discussion. We now have another week for that discussion to take place. If everybody digs in their heels with a "my way or nothing" attitude, we will have achieved nothing. Note that protection of the current version is not an endorsement of that version — I was simply tired of seeing the template bouncing around like a ping-pong ball, especially with sock/meat puppet involvement. Andrwsc 22:22, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
The last discussion on the issue lasting nearly six months resulted in there removal, yet one editor was allowed to repeatly insert them into the template that we were told could be protected to prevent this type of edit war, yet all thats done is he receives a warning and his attempt to avoid the discussion is allowed to stand. There inclusion is POV, and has no basis in fact. You say the current version is not an endorsement of that version, that means nothing when his POV is allowed to stand.--padraig3uk 22:31, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Protection is not a policy used to guarantee a certain POV; it is used to prevent article disruption, which is clearly what was just taking place. Andrwsc 22:33, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
You where the person that created and moved the infobox to this article to enable the un-protection of the [[Northern Ireland article, you where told at the time it would need protection to prevent a repeat of the edit wars, so you could have restored the article back to the version you created before protecting it. User:Setanta747 has made 7 reverts after his initial edit within 48hrs and he only received a warning for edit warring, I and other editors have been blocked for making 3rr on other articles.--padraig3uk 22:44, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
Seeing as some editors are allowed to push there POV on this issue and ignore consensus, I propose to re-create the original template as Template:Northern Ireland infobox1 and replace the one on the Northern Ireland article, if I did would you protect the template.--padraig3uk 00:58, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
With all due respect Andrwsc you are involved in the situation and voted to keep the Ulster Banner in the article, you cannot be considerd impartial in this matter and to be honest you do not seem to be acting that way. --Barryob Vigeur de dessus 01:02, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
True, I am trying to build consensus here. User:Padraig3uk and User:Vintagekits drew me into this issue by bringing their squabbles over to Wikipedia:WikiProject Flag Template, which is (was?) a project only concerned with the internal mechanisms of flag image rendering, and had been immune to political debates until then.
As for my previous "vote", surely you have seen that I have moved on to propose a subsequent compromise. I find the suppression of information unacceptable, so I have suggested that we include both flags, with appropriate captions, of course. As for my actions here, I think it would have been less neutral for me to have taken the time to restore Padraig3uk's version and protect that from editors who disagree with his POV. When there is a no-consensus situation, it doesn't matter which one is "frozen". The point is that neither are acceptable and we need to engage in discussion to find the right compromise, not just blindly revert each others edits without any thought. Andrwsc 17:33, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
This must be a blow to you Viguer/Padraig, since up to now the Ireland-related articles are generally "superinteded" by Admins of an Irish Nationalist disposition, who routinely "preserve, protect and defend" all kinds of incivility and gross breaches of the policies so long as the editors concerned carry the right POV. Wikipedia at it's finest! Sheesh. MarkThomas 09:28, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Who would those admins be that your refering to ?.--padraig3uk 10:01, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Padraig3uk, I am dismayed by your behaviour. You completely bypassed the good-faith attempt to find a permanent consensus for the Northern Ireland infobox. You seem completely unwilling to work towards an acceptable compromise for both sides of the issue - it's "your way", or "no way". The lack of cooperative behaviour is contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia. I implore you to re-examine your position — unless you actually enjoy the perpetual edit-warring on those articles, in which case, nothing will help. Andrwsc 17:33, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
My position is that WP present facts, not the POV of certain editors using WP as a soapbox to promote that Northern Ireland is still a Unionist state as it was between 1922-72, they have to accept that the political reality today is that this is not the case, and no matter how much they wish for a return to that situation it will never happen. Northern Ireland today is run by a coalition of all parties representing both communities, its government is trying to overcome the mistakes of the past and build mutural respect and trust between the two communities. This is one reason why the Assembly have avoided the issue of flags and emblems as they know that both sides will never agree consensus on the issue.
As for consensus on this issue in WP, we already have a neutral position in that no flag is used in the infobox, this reflects the current legal situation in both Northern Ireland and the Assembly. The Ulster Banner and Coat of Arms are already included within the main body of the article as they have historical part of the history of the state, and it was me that included them in the article. There is no need for the inclusion of flags in infoboxs, especially when none exist that are recognised by the government of that State to represent them, as in this case.--padraig3uk 03:09, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Jeu de Paume bracket

Oops, I missed that four set match. Sorry! Andrwsc 16:41, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Not to worry. Easily fixed! -- Jonel (Speak to me) 16:43, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Northern Ireland infobox

Hello Andrwsc, are you going to allow User:Setanta747 to have this [6] blocked again. Having already broken the 3RR your advice has gone unheeded. --Domer48 19:20, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm staying away from this mess for a few days. None of these editors are behaving reasonably. We have multiple instances of disrputive editing, incivility, sockpuppets, and so on. It is clear that individual political agendas outweigh cooperative encyclopedia construction in this case. Please take this issue to the appropriate noticeboard and I'm sure another admin will help you. Andrwsc 19:29, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
What exactly are you suggesting about me? So do I take it as an admin, you are abdicating your responsibilities and making a bland remark on editors motivation? I think I’m entitled to some explanation! --Domer48 21:34, 6 July 2007 (UTC) Please reply to my talk page
I'll respond here to keep the discussion thread intact. I'm not suggesting anything about you. I don't see your name in the edit history of that template, so why would you think I was suggesting anything about you? As for being an admin, my only "responsibility" is to follow correct Wikipedia policy in my actions. I am not impelled to make any specific actions if I don't want to. And right now, I'm taking a wikibreak from that article. Andrwsc 21:41, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Your protection of Template:Northern Ireland infobox

Hi Tariqabjotu, I'm not sure that your protection of that template is all that useful. When I first separated the infobox out of the main article (Northern Ireland) as a single-transclusion template, the intent was to keep the main article unprotected for other non-infobox related edits, while the dispute on the infobox played out. However, since the main article is currently unprotected, editors are able to create their own versions of the infobox and put it in the main article, completely bypassing the protected template. This has already happened. My attempt at dispute resolution was a failure. I think the proper course of action is to reverse my work and put the infobox code back inline into the main article and protect that instead. Thanks, Andrwsc 21:49, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

That might work. Perhaps this should be presented to WP:ANI for more feedback, however. Padraig3uk (talk · contribs) appears to have been disruptive with flags in a lot of places. -- tariqabjotu 22:24, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Actually, you're right. Let's just go for protection at the moment and delete the templates. -- tariqabjotu 22:27, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Can I comment on this, firstly Andrwsc, you did created a seperate template to allow the Northern Ireland article to be unprotected, something I agreed with, and also something I did myself in the past if you care to check through the edit history over the past 6 months, on that occassion the template was nominated for deletion by another editor involved in the dispute on the flag issue.
The template you created this time you didn't protect when you created it, dispite being told it would need protection to prevent an edit war, you then allowed one editor to reinsert the flag, and carry out 7 reverts in a 48hr period, before you protected the template and give that editor a warning about edit warring dispite the fact they had broken 3RR and should have been blocked from editing, yet you failed to revert the template back to it original state.
There are a small group of editors trying to use WP as a soapbox to promote a particular political POV on Northern Ireland the flag issue is only part of that they are also pushing the notion that all Northern Ireland people are Northern Irish as a ethic group or nationality, this is completely false as people in Northern Ireland can either regard themselves as British, Irish or with duel British/Irish nationality, Northern Irish is a Unionist creation.
I believe that WP should present the facts of the political situation in Northern Ireland, in this the Official Flag is the Union Flag, not the Ulster Banner. I also have no objection to the use of the Ulster banner in its proper context, when dealing with the period of 1921-72, I even used the Ulster Banner in this Template:Politics of Northern Ireland 1921-72 template I created to deal with the government and elections of that period, nor do I object to its use when dealing with sports people that identify with that flag or play in the commonwealth games under that flag. But I do object with their attempts to protray the Ulster Banner as representing Northern Ireland and its government today or since 1972.--padraig3uk 02:42, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
While I appreciate the effort spent in composing this reply, I have to say that it is irrelevant to this topic. The point here is not the content in your edits, but your behaviour in making them. You seem to think that the purpose of that template was to protect your preferred content of the infobox. Wrong. Protection is a mechanism to stop edit-warring. It is not intended to "freeze" one particular POV indefinitely and prevent additional changes. When User:John's protection on the main article expired, neither I nor him was obligated to immediately re-protect either the main article or the template. Only if edit-warring re-started (which it did) should protection be re-applied. Of course, that's precisely what happened, so I stepped in after there were 7 edits in less than 60 minutes on July 5. You immediately cried foul because I happened to hit the "protect" button when the infobox was in a state you disagreed with. And here's the problem — instead of honoring the intent of the template, you found the "loophole" in this scheme and completely bypassed the infobox to re-insert your POV into the main article. It's this lack of respect for Wikipedia etiquette that I find appalling. It is polar opposite to the idea of cooperative editing that is the very foundation of Wikipedia. Andrwsc 15:23, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I didn't insert my POV in the template, I restored the facts of the issue to the template, removing the POV of another editor, nor was I involved in the edit war that was going on prior to you protecting the infobox template, also before I inserted the new template I ask you to restore the version that had concensus, which was the version you had moved to a seperate template, which when you ask for comments on before the move on the talk page we told you it would need to be protected to prevent a edit war whilst discussion was continuing in the talk page.--padraig3uk 15:54, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Every edit has POV (the question is if the POV is a neutral POV). Don't take offense at my use of that term. The version of the infobox without any flags has one POV, the version with the UB has another POV, and other versions with other combinations will have other POVs.
As for consensus, I see no consensus on that issue, so don't pretend there is one. I've read all the talk page comments, seen (and participated in) the straw poll results, etc. Consensus does not mean 50%+1 majority on a straw poll. By definition, there is no consensus since the issue continues to be debated and multiple editors still make changes to the infobox
Moving the infobox to a template was an effort to build consensus without disrupting the main article. It was not a mechanism designed to guarantee one POV over another. Andrwsc 16:27, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Andrwsc, you have only recently become involved in this issue, others including myself have spent over 6 months or more discussing the issue. If you check through the archives of the talk page you will see the many different discussions and the previous votes on the issue and the decision was made to remove the flags and symbols entirely as the only NPOV available.--padraig3uk 16:40, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I have been following the issue for longer than my direct involvement indicates, and I have read through all the talk page discussions (incl. archives). I still see no consensus. I see a stalemate that requires fresh ideas, because obviously, the "decision" you cite isn't sustainable. Andrwsc 16:44, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Check this out Template:Northern Ireland cities User:Setanta747 is edit warring again over the flagicons, this is dispite the warning he was given last time.--padraig3uk 20:57, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
He has now made 4RR on Northern Ireland and is also edit warring again.--padraig3uk 23:03, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Medal counts, templates etc. in respect to Germany

Thanks for acknowledging and solving the table width issue.

As you seem to be involved in the matter, I'll tell you first before starting on talk pages etc.

  • I'm convinced that Summer Olympics medal count, Winter Olympics medal count, and Total Olympics medal count should be merged into one article as they cover very related subjects which are very sensitive regarding WP:NPOV and WP:NOR. Footnote remarks, caveats and especially talk should be concentrated on one page to avoid having to discuss the same matters three times
  • statements on Wikipedia regarding Germany (I don't know details about other nations) are often flawed, show ignorance, misunderstandings, or even open hostility towards aspects of German history, e.g. by calling short lived political entities under foreign influence "nations"
  • the inofficial terms West Germany and East Germany need to be replaced by the official Federal Republic of Germany (or simply Germany) and German Democratic Republic as they prove time and again to be misleading, especially since it is often claimed that these states did "unite to form Germany". Nothing new was created, the number of states in the FRG just grew in 1957 and 1990, similar to the number of US states grewing from 45 to 50 states between 1896 and 1959. The former West Germany and the current Germany are identical in most relevant aspects, and not different as the names (and the people by which they are used) suggest.

The current medal count articles are highly doubtful, as the IOC itself does not publish official all-time counts, and the IOC website gives a disclaimer for its informal single event tables: "The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not recognise global ranking per country; the medal tables are displayed for information only.". If Wikipedia choses to present medal count articles for information purposes, WP:NPOV and WP:NOR policies have to be respected. This means citing lists published by respectable sources is more relevant than original research calculations. For example, German magazine Der Spiegel ranks Russia first ahead of Germany in winter games based on the Gold medals score of 121 vs. 119 [7] (the total medal score preferred by some would favour Germany 329 vs. 294). Where are references or links for the lists kept by "IAAF and BBC, but not by NBC and CNN" anyway? Apparently, only tables covering single Olympic Games are listed on their websites, with CNN/SI being the only one presenting a readily available All-Time Medal Count until Nagano 1998 at least, in which they seem to have split the United team results into Germany 1908-1994 and East Germany 1956-1988. Other links: [8] [9] [10] [11]

In case of Germany (one editor even talks about "Germanies"), the IOC, despite using five(!) different codes in total for German teams, clearly states that Germany joined the IOC in 1895 [12] as one of the first states to do so, acknowledging a continuation in sports despite changes in political history. They also state e.g. in the table for 1988 "Federal Republic of Germany (1950-1990, "GER" since) FRG that the Federal Republic of Germany continued the German history after 1990 when the separate German Democratic Republic ceased to exist. The East German institutions, citizens and athletes joined the FRG in 1990, and since the established GER code is used again. This continuation is widely accepted, e.g. regarding similar continuous German membership in post-war organizations like UNO, NATO, EU, and also in many organisations that have a much longer history. This means that in retrospect it is de facto acknowledged that the FRG also represented Germany in times when parts of the German population had to live in rival puppet states under foreign occupation.

Also, what did the Unified Team of Germany represent, if not the united Germany? Apparently, the code GER was used then, and EUA was only introduced recently for unknown reasons. Thus, at least the results of the teams listed under the codes of GER, FRG and EUA should also be presented in accumulation, as they always represented the largest part of Germany, and never competed against each other. In contrast, GDR and SAA represented competing teams that only existed due to foreign influence.

In its current form, the count reminds of repeated attempts by some Wikipedia editors to introduce a separate Talk:West Germany national football team, claiming that only the now defunct West Germany team won World Cups, and that Germany won only an EC in 1996, even tough FIFA and UEFA clearly recognize the results and the history of the DFB from early 1900s to present, with additional independent Saarland and East German teams existing for some time.

On can argue whether it is fair to simply add the GDR results to the other German results, as e.g. both German entries could have won a medal each in a single team event ( e.g. Munich 1972, 4x100m relay Women, FRG winning Gold and GDR Silver). It certainly was not the choice of the Germans to be cunningly split in order to have the chance to score twice. In many cases, a unified stronger team might have won medals in contests in which none of the separate teams managed to succeed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Matthead (talk • contribs)

I think you raise many important issues, so instead of replying here, I've copied your message (with my long reply) to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Olympics, where there are a group of really good editors who are also dedicated to the Olympic pages and who can provide some useful feedback too. Thanks, Andrwsc 19:30, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Field hockey teams template

Hi, Andrwsc, can you make a template like {{fb}} and {{fb-rt}} in football for field hockey teams? If not, just ignoring my message. Cheers! --Aleenf1 17:50, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Sure! I am tackling each sport one-by-one, finished with basketball and almost done with football. I already have templates ready to go for rugby, cricket, and tennis. It's easy to add new ones. For the most part, I am using the two-letter sport code (as used by the IOC) for each template to keep them brief. That would mean template:ho and template:ho-rt for hockey. (Ice hockey would be "ih"). The women's team templates would be template:how and template:how-rt. Is that ok? Or do you think it would be clearer with "fh"? Let me know either way and I can have them ready for you rather quickly. Andrwsc 18:01, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
"fh" is more clear, but can some teams can be done without redirect? Like Argentina women's field hockey team, currently name Las Leonas, can avoid redirect? I will submit some teams which not under "national field hockey team" if this can be solve. --Aleenf1 05:01, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I reached the same conclusion. I think ho and how could be misinterpreted! At this very moment, I am in the middle of creating {{fh}} etc., so feel free to start using them. As for the non-standard names, that is handled in the specific country template (in that case, Template:Country data Argentina, and I will fix that in a moment. Andrwsc 05:04, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I think Category:National field hockey teams can help you to find some teams that not belong under "national field hockey team". Thanks! --Aleenf1 05:43, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I have been looking there. I have fixed ARG to use Las Leonas and AUS for Hockeyroos. For New Zealand, there seems to be some controversy (on the talk pages) about what Black Sticks should refer to (men, women, or both), so I left it alone for now. Andrwsc 06:03, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I think I'm done with these! I've updated a handful of articles (both men and women) to use the new templates, and all works fine. Here are a couple of things I've noticed: First, I saw that Ireland apparently has an all-Ireland team (i.e. not just representing the Republic of Ireland), and the "shamrock flag" (used in rugby) was used on the hockey pages. Therefore, I made the template automatically use that flag for the fh templates too. Note that there are two Country data templates for Ireland, so you have to select the right one. If you specify Republic of Ireland, or it's standard country code IRL, you will get the wrong link, flag, and name. If you specify Ireland, you'll get the all-Ireland link, flag and name. I have also created a non-standard country code of IRE (distinct from IRL) as a shortcut for the all-Ireland templates. Therefore, {{fh|IRE}} creates  Ireland. A similar situation is used for the football templates — {{fb|IRL}} creates  Republic of Ireland and {{fb|IRE}} creates  Ireland.
Secondly, I see that "Korea" was used instead of "South Korea". However, with the templates, {{fh|KOR}} creates  South Korea. Right now, neither men's nor women's team articles exist, so they are both redlinks. If it is essential that "Korea" be used for the article names and display links, let me know, otherwise I will leave it as "South Korea".
Hope this helps! Andrwsc 17:11, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, thanks for Ireland one. And the field hockey organisation use "Korea" as South Korea team name, so i think it should be change. Thanks! --Aleenf1 09:02, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Done. Andrwsc 14:45, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Women's basketball templates

I have created {{bkw}} and {{bkw-rt}}. Is the syntax, etc. okay? Thanks. —MC 01:37, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Yup, perfect! All the "esoteric" template code is buried inside Template:country flaglink, upon which these are all based, so templates like fb, bk, etc. only need to set up the correct input arguments. They are all very similar, as you've seen. Thanks! Andrwsc 04:12, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

United Kingdom flag template

Andrwsc - thank you for fixing up my flag templates on Robert Theobald and Dorothy Authterlonie. I usually work on Australian writers, but these two came in a strays. We think of Dorothy as one of our own. I will use the correct template next time if I drift into the region. Regards Stellar 04:04, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

No worries. Strictly speaking, those edits of mine weren't absolutely necessary, since {{flagicon|Great Britain}} and {{flagicon|United Kingdom}} draw the same flag. I am just being pedantic, I suppose, since Great Britain refers to the island and United Kingdom refers to the nation, so I prefer to see instances that refer to nationality use "United Kingdom". Andrwsc 22:40, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Belarus at the Olympics

Hmm...according to the talk page for the article, it says the medal tables needs to be cited to the point that every Olympic Games result needs to be cited. Is there a way we can arrange that to happen? User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 21:52, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Template

Hi, what do you think about this. Is better template {{davis-big}} similar to {{fb-big}} or {{davis-tp}}, where tp -> top similar to rt -> right. Thank You for Your answer. Kedarus 13:41, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

If you're thinking of something to replace the old templates, when called like {{USAdc|30|<br>}}, then I believe {{davis-big}} is the best name. I think naming consistency for all the sport-related flag templates is important, so that's why I've always used -rt for the right-side flag versions, regardless of sport, for example. If you're thinking of something to use for the top of {{DavisCupbox}}, then I think the best solution might be to consider an alternate format for that template so that {{davis-big}} could be used for both the left and right side of the match result box. For example, 1954 Davis Cup includes the following:

Mexico
1 		Centro Deportivo Chapultepec, Mexico City, Mexico
1 October - 3 October 1954
clay
United States
4
1 2 3 4 5
1 Mexico
United States 		Gustavo Palafox
Vic Seixas 		6
4 		6
4 		7
5 		     
2 Mexico
United States 		Mario Llamas
Tony Trabert 		4
6 		3
6 		6
8 		     
3 Mexico
United States 		Mario Llamas / Gustavo Palafox
Vic Seixas / Tony Trabert 		2
6 		6
3 		1
6 		4
6 		   
4 Mexico
United States 		Mario Llamas
Vic Seixas 		4
6 		6
2 		3
6 		2
6 		   
5 Mexico
United States 		Gustavo Palafox
Tony Trabert 		12
14 		1
6 		2
6 		     
Using a modified template (which I have created at Template:DavisCupbox2 for testing), the flag selection wikicode is changed in favor of a "variant selector", which is more maintainable. The result is:
{{DavisCupbox2
|team1=Mexico |team1-var=1934
|team2=United States|team2-var=1912
|venue=Centro Deportivo Chapultepec, [[Mexico City]], [[Mexico]]
|date=1 October - 3 October 1954
|surface=clay
|score1=1
|score2=4
|R1={{ TennisMatch |T1P1=[[Gustavo Palafox]] |6 |6 |7 | | |T2P1=[[Vic Seixas]] |4 |4 |5 | | }}
|R2={{ TennisMatch |T1P1=[[Mario Llamas]] |4 |3 |6 | | |T2P1=[[Tony Trabert]] |6 |6 |8 | | }}
|R3={{ TennisMatch |T1P1=[[Mario Llamas]] |T1P2=[[Gustavo Palafox]] |2 |6 |1 |4 | |T2P1=[[Vic Seixas]] |T2P2=[[Tony Trabert]] |6 |3 |6 |6 | }}
|R4={{ TennisMatch |T1P1=[[Mario Llamas]] |4 |6 |3 |2 | |T2P1=[[Vic Seixas]] |6 |2 |6 |6 | }}
|R5={{ TennisMatch |T1P1=[[Gustavo Palafox]] |12 |1 |2 | | |T2P1=[[Tony Trabert]] |14 |6 |6 | | }}
}}
This new version uses {{davis-big}} internally, so there is no need to create different versions for the flag on the top left or top right. I think it looks better with the final score a bit more prominent also. What do you think? Andrwsc 23:09, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I think that it is good idea. Kedarus 10:04, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Template deleting

Please help me, how I can delete some "bad" templates which I create? Kedarus 10:08, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

If they are just "leftovers" that nobody else ever used or edited, simply put {{db-self}} on the page and an admin will come along and delete it for you. Andrwsc 10:12, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Country

Hi Andrwsc, what is the purpose of this? Thanks. —MC 17:45, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

It was (is) a meta-template that used to be the "root" of the previous implementation of the flag templates. For example, {{flagicon}} used to be internally coded as {{country|flagicon|...}}. User:Ligulem replaced this implementation with the current version based on the set of Category:Country data templates at the beginning of 2007. Now, I think the only remains of {{country}} are instances where {{country|name|...}} is used to extract the "alias" variable out of the parameterized country_data_xxx data structure. Andrwsc 19:18, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
So, isn't it obsolete then? Why would the "alias" variable need to be extracted? —MC 21:23, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, a quick look at "What links here" shows several usage instances. I think the only real need to use a meta-template for finding the "alias" value is where the input argument comes from another template. template:flagathlete is a good example of that. This template is always called with a three letter country code, but renders a wikilink to the proper article name, which requires the "alias" value. I suppose it could be handled differently, removing the need for {{country}}, but that's not the situation now. What problem are you trying to solve? Andrwsc 21:43, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Nothing but curiosity! :-) Thanks for the explanation. —MC ·talk 22:21, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, no worries! Andrwsc 22:30, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Andrwsc, about those altlinks; couldn't they be used when a country has been known under different names, but have kept the same flag. For example the Korea template I created could be used both as Korea Joseon Dynasty and Korea Korean Empire. Or maybe I have just misunderstood the function of this template... ;) Cheers, --Himasaram 02:23, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

No, sorry, you misunderstand how this works. The altlink parameter is used to create wikilinks that have the country name as the prefix part of the article name. See {{flaglink}} for a general example of how this is used, or specific sport team templates such as {{fb}} for football, {{bk}} for basketball, etc. In South Korea's case, these articles don't always follow the form of the standard "Country national football team", for example. FIFA uses "Korea Republic" as the team name, so that's why the link alias-football appears in that template. The altvar parameter is used to select that.
So, that means that country_data templates that aren't used with any sport team templates do not need (and should not include) the altlink and altvar parameters, and it also means that this mechanism isn't used for completely different links. I see that someone else created Template:Country data Korean Empire, but to be honest, I don't see anything wrong with using {{flagicon|Korea}} [[Joseon Dynasty]] in an article. We don't need to create country_data templates for every variation imaginable - just enough to make editing convenient without being confusing. Hope this help, Andrwsc 16:47, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Ireland flag (again)

Hi Andrew, I'm aware of the issue. Initially I started trying to fix the link. At the moment,  Ireland links to the island, whereas the flag shown is for the state. As we all know the island has no flag, but the state of the same name is not conterminous to the island. This is causing problems on articles, reverting forward and back between Ireland/Republic of Ireland.

{{flag|Ireland}} obviously needs fixing. We need to find a solution to this and the flag of the state cannot link to the article of the island. Also, {{flag|Republic of Ireland}} should be changed so that it shows "Ireland" (the conventional name of the state) not "Republic of Ireland". I'm leaving a message of Template:flag to use the shortname alias value from country data instead of the page title. --sony-youthpléigh 14:21, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure there are no use of {{flag|Ireland}}? How I came across the issue was because that was what I was using. Just saw your revert to RoI as well. I don't understand the issue there. So, is it correct to assume then that it is technically impossible to show the correct flag/name combination for Ireland? That either {{flag|Ireland}} will link to the wrong article or {{flag|Republic of Ireland}} will show the wrong name without using the "name" attribute? --sony-youthpléigh 14:31, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, you're right! It's early in the morning where I am, so I haven't quite woken up, I guess! I was thinking of something else. I have gone back to Template:Country data Republic of Ireland and made some changes so that {{flagcountry|Ireland}} and {{flagcountry|IRL}} will use the preferred shortname alias, but {{fb|IRL}} still works as expected. Template:flag will always be awkward for any of the templates where shortname_alias ≠ alias. (And these are documented at Category:Country data templates with distinct shortname.) That's the main reason why {{flagcountry}} exists — you can always use that if you want to guarantee that the shortname_alias will be used. Hope this helps, Andrwsc 14:40, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
I was going to ask if short name alias could be used in {{flag}} and {{flagicon}}. Are you aware of any issue for not doing so? (By the way, good morning!) --sony-youthpléigh 16:05, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, {{flagicon}} only keys off the template name, and shortname alias isn't used at all. It uses alias only for the "alt text", so when you hover your mouse over the image, you see "Flag of {{{alias}}}".
As for {{flag}}, changing its behaviour would break all sorts of other instances. Basically, we have several situations:
  1. When shortname alias = alias, both flag and flagcountry do the same thing when invoked with the full template name. However, flag will follow the input argument when a redirect alias is used. Therefore {{flag|IRL}} will produce  IRL, and there are a fair amount of articles (mostly sports-related, where country code usage is common) that depend on this behaviour.
  2. When shortname alias ≠ alias, use {{flagcountry}} (with any input argument, full name or country code) to get the desired result. That leaves {{flag}}, which will still follow the input argument for the display text, but will always use the correct article link.
I am planning to make some significant improvements to the documentation of these templates, and maybe that's the best place to handle this. As for Ireland, if the articles get renamed then we have some work to do, but maybe it's manageable. I would use Template:Country data All-Ireland for any reference to non-republic flags and then Template:Country data Ireland would be used for the tricolour. But if they remain named as is, then I think the current implementation works. (And thanks for the wake-up!) Andrwsc 16:29, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Is it possible to redirect the "link alias" depending on It as per what happens currently with flag alias-footbal? So by defalt it links to Republic of Ireland and shows the tricolour, but for sports it links to the island. Doing this would mean that it would be possible to simply scrap the Republic of Ireland country data and simply have one "Ireland." Surprisingly, this may not be as controversial as it sounds - contradictory, I know, considering how much you've been bitten on the NI page, but I suspect that it would be OK. It would simplify things a lot. --sony-youthpléigh 18:26, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
It would — if every sport-related instance was under template control, such as {{fb}} for football, {{ru}} for rugby, etc. Unfortunately, that's not the case. There are a great number of sports for which there is no "team" page to link to. For example, some curling pages use {{flag|Ireland|4prov}} for  Ireland in results tables. There is no such thing as a "national curling team", so the link to Ireland is the best option. And of course, there are many instances where the "1783" flag variant is used for athletes (tennis, golf, etc.) while they were part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and again, the link to Ireland is way better than a link to Republic of Ireland, but there's no way for the template itself to "know" about how it is transcluded. I can't think of any easy way to handle those situations outside of the current implementation. Andrwsc 18:38, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Aaah! I've implemented a solution using an "if" statement. If the flag uses a variant (i.e. anything other than the tricolour) then it points to Ireland, otherwise it points to Republic of Ireland. I see if I can do anything for the alt tag, but its not such a big deal. --sony-youthpléigh 19:53, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

That's a good solution to the problem! I've been trying to avoid using conditionals in these templates, but that's a good reason to use one. I won't give you too much grief for taking 15 edits (!!) to figure it out, though. Andrwsc 23:43, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Ha ha! Yes! 15 edits was a bit over the top! Thanks for your help thoughout. What do you think about the liklihood of making the changes I proposed to the Country_flagcountry2 and Country_flagicon2? --sony-youthpléigh 07:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
The discussion was at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Flag Template#Alt text "Flag of Country" between me and User:Ligulem from five months ago, but the implementation stalled after that. Might I ask, why is "Flag of Republic of Ireland" in need of fixing? Thanks, Andrwsc 16:12, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
{{flag|Ireland}} ( Ireland) is not such a serious issue, only just for tidiness sake, but {{fb|Ireland}} ( Ireland) is a problem. Doing the "fix" regardless of the country_data_ireland issues, would mean tidier alt tags for all of the countries in this list. I don't know how many blind users use Wikipedia, but it is pretty crucial for screen readers to have proper alt tags. For users with their vision, its just nice to have a proper alt tag. It strikes me as a pretty light-weight solution and doesn't require changing any existing country_data.
Ah, I get it. I guess this is a "snowball effect" of your change to Template:Country data Ireland.  ;)
Alternatively, why is "shortname alias" not used instead of "alias" for the alt tag in Country_flagcountry2 and Country flagicon2. That would strike me as the most obvious thing to do. --sony-youthpléigh 16:33, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
I think it was because we wanted to handle cases like showing "Flag of the People's Republic of China" instead of "Flag of China", for example.
These templates seem to work better when the template name = shortname alias, but have quirks when template name = alias and shortname alias ≠ alias. I think it's time to solve the "alt text" problem first dicussed five months ago! I'll try to get to it shortly. Thanks, Andrwsc 16:40, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah! Yes, China. Thanks, And. --sony-youthpléigh 19:06, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Need your expert help!

Hello! I hope you are feeling great! Anyway, I would like to have your expert help with regards to a template. For further information, please view this page. I hope that you will be able to fix this minor problem, so as to achieve greater consistency in this project. --Siva1979Talk to me 15:31, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Partial Revert

Why did you partially revert my edit at [13]? I didn't at all remove the "colonial" alias; I just removed it from list in the variants section so that the "1885" alias would be used in the future. IMHO "colonial" is a misnomer since the "1958" design is also a flag of colonial Barbados. --Himasaram 22:29, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I reverted because, misnomer or not, "colonial" is the pseudo-standard label name used to select pre-independence British ensigns for quite a few countries. I think it makes most sense to use the same label as often as possible to make it easier for editors to remember. Andrwsc 22:43, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Ensigns and Jacks

It's really nice of you to add naval aliases for a lot of country data templates! I believe that we have a small situation, though. There are generally two classes of national maritime flags: ensigns and jacks. Where an ensign replaces the national flag at sea, the jack is just a supplement flown on special occasions (c.f. maritime flag.) Right now, the two classes are sorted under the same flag alias naval which might give people the impression that they all have equal status, which obviously is wrong. For example, the British United Kingdom is an ensign while the Brazilian Brazil is a jack. The solution could be either to remove all newly created naval aliases that contains jacks, or rename them jack or similar. --Himasaram 22:46, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I am currently working to integrate the parallel flag template mechanism used by {{Navy USA}} et. al. into the same underlying implementation as {{flag}} et. al. I am simply re-using the same images used by those templates. Please look at List of navies and let me know if any of those flags are inappropriate to use with the corresponding navy article, and I will make the changes. Thanks, Andrwsc 22:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Of the designs in that list, these seems to be jacks (by looking at their file names, basically):  Argentine Navy  Brazilian Navy  Royal Canadian Navy  Chilean Navy  Croatian Navy  Hellenic Navy  Indonesian Navy  Irish Naval Service  Italian Navy  Republic of Korea Navy  Royal Netherlands Navy  Pakistan Navy  Peruvian Navy Philippine Navy  Portuguese Navy  Romanian Naval Forces  Spanish Navy  Republic of China Navy  United States Navy  Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela
Unsure about File:Az~nav.PNG Azerbaijan Navy  Royal Brunei Navy
--Himasaram 23:33, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Found out that the Brunei flag shown above is in fact the war flag, while the naval ensign is . C.f. Flag of Brunei. --Himasaram 23:42, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Also, the Azerbaijani design shown is apparently neither an ensign nor a jack but a "ceremonial naval flag" ([14]). --Himasaram 23:44, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that! I certainly don't know much about the details of jacks vs. ensigns (or even civil vs. state flags), as I'm just the "template plumber" here! However, I do note that the "naval jack" for the USA (for instance) is figured prominently on hundreds of articles about specific ships, and I presume the editors of those articles know what they're doing. I certainly see some errors in the {{Navy xxx}} set of templates, so it would be nice to fix them now, but I am not sure that the image filename is the best way to determine if the "jack" or "ensign" is appropriate to represent the respective navy. My uneducated guess is that some of those "jacks" are in fact ensigns, based on the design and dimensions (e.g. CAN, KOR, ROC and USA on that list). The square designs seem to be more ornamental, fitting the definition of a jack. But that's just my guess! Andrwsc 23:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
You're welcome! Being the vexillology beginner I am, I cannot of course be 100% certain in my judgment; on the other hand, there's a good chance that the Flags and Heraldry wikiproject here together with the national flag taskforce over at Commons have made quite sure that jacks and ensigns are named correctly. To take the US naval jack for example - I added it to a number of articles a short while ago to represent the US Navy and its commanders, but those edits have all been reverted now with the reason: The US Navy uses it's National Flag as it's ensign. That flag is a jack.... In any case, we need an expert over here to pass a final verdict... --Himasaram 00:08, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, the good news is that the changes I'm making to Template:Navy are compatible with this approach. Basically, the template uses any naval variant, if present in the country_data structure, but if not, falls back to the standard flag. Therefore, if there are inappropriate flag usage for specific countries, then you would only need to remove or rename the naval variant and voilà, all transclusions via {{navy}} would be updated. Right now, I am just going to update the template code so that none of the existing instances visually change, but I certainly welcome any efforts to make sure that all those specific images are corrected where necessary. Thanks! Andrwsc 16:23, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Autism or pure stubbornness?

This User:João Felipe C.S is really one of those users that have a knack to make an editor lose his/her patience! Besides editing as his will commands, acting blind to all suggestions made on his and the article's talk page, he's not stopped by others users' edits — if he doesn't like, he changes completely back to his envisioned concept, disregarding any consensus reached so far. He continues to display all countries besides the medaled ones and ranking them as if they weren't tied, assuming the alphabetical order is a tie-breaking system!!!

Tell me, what can be done? I don't think a editing war will result. Cheers Paruta(l)kupiu 00:11, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, I would just leave it alone until the Games are over and then fix things up. I have a suspicion that editor is a "fair weather" sports fan who is interested in the Brazilian topic du jour rather than having lasting interest in sports results. We'll have to be even more patient in 2008, I suspect, when large numbers of these kinds of editors descend upon our project! Cheers, Andrwsc 01:09, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
You're right. I told that myself before, but it's gets annoying seeing him reverting everything back to his fixed ideas. I'll do that then, thanks. Paruta(l)kupiu 02:57, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Need your help!

Hello! I hope you are feeling great. I need a help from you with regards to templates. For more information, please view this page. I feel that it is paramount to achieve consistency with regards to templates. If you know how to correct this, it would be much appreciated. --Siva1979Talk to me 05:02, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

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