Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2016 April 3

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April 3

Template:Important concept

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

The result of the discussion was delete. Izkala (talk) 17:14, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Important concept (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Essentially duplicates Template:Policy, which are likely to be the only pages where this template would be used. Additionally, it could be mis-used outside the meta-space, so any use of this template must be restricted to non-article space, if in fact the template is kept. Izno (talk) 19:15, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wait This template is useful and it is different from Template:Policy, I think.--Shwangtianyuan Happy Chinese New Year to everyone 02:35, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment the WP:Five pillars would seem to sit above policy in the WP:POLICY hierarchy of pillars > principles > polices > guidelines > wikiproject localconsensuses ; it could be renamed to {{five pillars page}} or something -- 70.51.46.39 (talk) 04:40, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. While I appreciate that the editor who created this is being helpful, I don't think there's any need for this template when the relevant policies already transclude templates like {{policy}}, and I also have some concerns about potential for confusion. While Wikipedia:Five pillars is an unusually helpful page to direct new editors to the core policies, it's not a policy or guideline. The same is true of Wikipedia:Core content policies. While people hold up the five pillars as some of the most important policies (with good reason!), they have no official status that elevates them above other policies. This template has substantial potential to confuse editors into thinking the five pillars somehow stand above other policies. In fact, it appears to already have done this to the IP above me. ~ Rob^Talk 05:09, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete In principle the template is a good idea in that it attempts to highlight important pages for those new to Wikipedia, but often small is good and adding more gumph to the top of a page does not help. An implication of the notice may be that readers can ignore pages which do not carry the message. Johnuniq (talk) 22:57, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Wait, per Wait arguments above. Or relist. -Mardus /talk 03:00, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, per Rob and Izno. —zziccardi (talk) 01:57, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am waiting for the result. If the result is Delete, I have right to appeal.--Shwangtianyuan Happy Chinese New Year to everyone 03:33, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- @Shwangtianyuan: I just want to make sure you understand the DRV process and don't have unrealistic expectations there. DRV determines whether consensus was assessed appropriately at the original discussion. It is not a "do-over" of the original discussion. ~ Rob^Talk 04:24, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Shwangtianyuan and Mardus: Could you clarify exactly what we're waiting for? I'm a bit confused by your request for more time. More time for what? ~ Rob^Talk 04:25, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@BU Rob13: Until there's enough relevant discussion and votes. -Mardus /talk 13:05, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Mardus: just to be clear, then, you're not voting to keep? ~ Rob^Talk 13:15, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@BU Rob13: I'm now voting to Keep, or for the template to be merged into {{Policy}} as an alternative, because the template under discussion is different in nature from the Policy template. I first voted to wait, because it does not appear, as if most of the respondents understood that there is a difference between the two. This template notifies all readers about something important regarding Wikipedia and its values, while the Policy template is primarily meant for editors. -Mardus /talk 13:37, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Except it's the case that the pages on which this template would appear... are pages which are bent toward editors, not readers. --Izno (talk) 17:22, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. When I first saw it, I thought it was a good idea, but I realized that it would lead to an excess of banners at the top of pages that it was on. APerson (talk!) 20:55, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Two or three is more? I don't think so.--Shwangtianyuan Happy Chinese New Year to everyone 04:51, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

About3 & About4

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

The result of the discussion was merge About3/4 into About as per WP:SNOW. Pinging Nihiltres as requested. If you're not familiar with AWB/regex, let me know. AWB would make this merge very, very simple. ~ Rob^Talk 17:07, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Template:About3 (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)
Template:About4 (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)
Template:About (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Propose merging Template:About3 and Template:About4 with Template:About.
I've been doing some maintenance on hatnote templates, and these two templates, {{about3}} and {{about4}} (also known as {{two other uses}} and {{three other uses}} respectively) add needless complexity to our hatnote systems. In almost all respects they duplicate {{about}} (they themselves transclude {{about}} to produce their functionality!), but when a certain number of arguments are present, they add a single extra "For X, see Y" argument, almost always in the form "For other uses, see PAGENAME (disambiguation)". In other words, every single one of their transclusions could be replaced with plain {{about}} calls, usually with a single extra parameter containing "other uses" added, e.g. {{about3|...}} → {{about|...|other uses}}.

As a side benefit to reducing the number of hatnote templates out there, it'll in particular reduce the number of hatnote templates that produce their own functionality by transcluding {{about}}, which is a barrier to my converting {{about}} to use a Lua module, letting it offer fancy Module:Hatnote-based features like automatically prettifying Article#Section to Article § Section, and cleaner implementation of the "and" keyword.

For some context:

{{about}}: ~140,000 transclusions (although note that about 40,000 of those are presumably {{other uses}} transclusions, since it also abuses {{about}}; fixing that's also on my list.)
{{about3}}: ~1500 transclusions
{{about4}}: ~140 transclusions

Although this is framed as a "merge" proposal, my goal here is to merge their uses to {{about}} and to delete them (and their redirects) once orphaned, to minimize potential confusion caused by the slight differences in functionality. For that reason, {{about}} has not been tagged as part of this nomination. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 18:07, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support as long as {{About}} can handle the cases set forth by the articles using {{about3}} and {{about4}} (which from what you stated, will be the case). - Favre1fan93 (talk) 00:09, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support since all of the template's functionality is to specify the other uses of an article and to behave in a similar way to {{about}}. DSCrowned^(talk) 22:46, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support. Make sure, then, that subsequent documentation is concise and easy to understand. -Mardus /talk 02:57, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Mardus: Will do. Overhauling hatnotes is a big project, but to start I'm focusing on simplifying the landscape. Getting rid of needless variants should serve to simplify documentation practically on its own, let alone the syntax used "in the wild". {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 15:27, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Current documentation being complicated is another showing of the complexity of the issue itself (todays hatnote-spaghetti, from an evolution). IOW, one can hardly write a simple & clean documentation for the current situation. Grand redesign will also simplify the stuff to be documented. -DePiep (talk) 21:30, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Weak support per Mardus. Getting rid of redundancy is always a good idea, but I've seen so many bad merges, in which the result is a highly confusing and (generally) rather complex template that's a lot harder to use. I support something that really does make the situation easier, but I'll oppose anything that doesn't handle existing cases well or that doesn't make itself simple to use. Nyttend (talk) 22:51, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support: I was wondering why we had so many nearly redundant hatnote templates a few months ago, and actually was thinking of proposing a merger, but somehow got busy and forgot to. – voidxor 00:46, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support for all reasons mentioned in the OP. Cleanup the hatnote landscape is an honorable and well-needed aim. -DePiep (talk) 12:35, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support Let's simplify the system. --Mr. Guye (talk) 22:42, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support: Eliminating redundancies definitely makes sense here. I'm looking forward to seeing the functionality handled by a Lua module. —zziccardi (talk) 01:51, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Note to closer, since this looks certain to close in favour of the nomination: please do not merge or delete the templates directly; instead please tag them with {{deprecated template|About}} and ping me in the close. I'll take responsibility for orphaning the templates and deleting them once orphaned; I've got the mop but need to establish consensus for the change. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 20:46, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- @Nihiltres: Were you thinking a bot run or manual orphaning? ~ Rob^Talk 04:27, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - @Rob: I'll probably do it manually, because often I'll notice and fix other things along the way, and because the parameter changes will vary just enough to make it a non-trivial bot job. Maybe if the going's slow I'll download AWB. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 16:02, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support per nom. --Proud User (talk) 10:57, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Always good to simplify. Liam987 talk 14:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

Template:Slavic Orthodox Christianity

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

The result of the discussion was relisted here. ~ Rob^Talk 03:24, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Slavic Orthodox Christianity (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

There is no such thing as "Slavic Orthodox Christianity". That article does not exist and the template it made up of various Eastern Orthodox concepts. Very confusing. Zoupan 18:18, 26 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I got the idea to create this template from some of the articles about the Russian slavophiles and articles like this one Slavic Orthodox. I did not create this article nor the term nor the other releated articles. So I wonder if the above editor can find a source that says there is no such thing as Slavic Orthodox? Since there is of course Slavic Christianity and Slavic neopaganism, Slavic Muslims and sources that use the term Slavic Orthodox [1], [2], [3]. LoveMonkey (talk) 14:42, 28 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, ~ Rob^Talk 13:54, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).