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"Investigate balance of C_NOTEs vs TFs"

As promised... From the tracking category, we see that 27 banners use one or more of the collapsed notes. From WhatLinksHere, we see that 21 banners use the /taskforces hook, indicating that they have an inadequate number of taskforces built into the banner. These results surprised me a little, I admit, but they seem correct. I remember that several of the projects using the hook have a huge number of taskforces, such that it would be a hopeless task trying to add enough taskforces for them. Consequently, and a little surprisingly, I don't think there's anything to be done here. Comments? Happy‑melon 19:36, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Another question that could be asked is: Should WPBannerMeta still support the collapsed notes directly or should those banners use the HOOK_COLLAPSED parameter and the hooks/notes template instead? -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:56, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it's important to have some support for 'basic' functionality in the core code; we could split a whole host of things out into hooks, but we'd soon find ourselves with nothing left in the main banner. Whether collapsed notes count as "basic" functionality is not entirely unequivocal, however. Happy‑melon 20:03, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

27 is not so many, and it would actually simplify the syntax somewhat to just use hook_collapsed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:49, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Importance

Now that the banner is using the {{Class}} template, just thinking about having something similar for Importance. The Importance template is already being used, so would need to think of another name to use though. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:45, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

In general, yes, I'd love to do that. I think it's worth making at least an attempt to get hold of that template name; that template itself is essentially a fork of {{notability}} and so should be merged/redirected there. Do we have icons for the importance scale? Happy‑melon 13:25, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

What about using an abbreviation such as {{Impor}}? We don't have icons for importance, and (not surprising given my comments above) I don't see why we would need any. PC78 (talk) 18:47, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, {{priority}} is unused. I also went ahead and created {{importancecol}} in anticipation of future use. PC78 (talk) 15:09, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

No way are we mixing up importance and priority any more than we already have :D It's a real shame we can't get hold of {{importance}}; we may have to go for something silly like {{importance-rating}}, and create a similar redirect for {{class-rating}} for consistency. Anyone fancy setting this up? Happy‑melon 15:14, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

 Done I've gone ahead and created {{Impor}} and {{Imporicon}}. There are icons for NA-Importance and Unknown-Importance. The only thing left is to bring {{Impor}} into the template.  Dylanlip  (talk) 16:55, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Hello? I never got a response from anyone about this. This seems extremely important. :|  Dylanlip  (talk) 12:22, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Is it? IMO the total borkage on Safari would seem to be more important, although a much trickier problem to resolve. Having said that, I am grateful to you for putting the code together. Happy‑melon 13:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Will also need some support for the priority categories as well, either by adding support in {{impor}} or by having a separate template. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:33, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Would that not be done via the |category= parameter as with the existing templates? PC78 (talk) 17:45, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

He means that the "-importance" part of the category link is hardcoded into {{impor}}, which will break when "-priority" should be used. Happy‑melon 17:53, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Why hardcode it then? That seems counterproductive here. PC78 (talk) 15:43, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Minor bug

The ASSESSMENT_CAT value is being ignored in favor of PROJECT (I think), in the case of the category name used when AUTO_ASSESS is on. That is, for Template:WikiProject Belgium for example, all of categories used by this template for assessment and cleanup sorting are in the form "Category:Top-importance Belgium-related articles", "Category:Belgium-related articles needing attention", etc., with the sole exception of "Category:Automatically assessed Belgium articles". — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 21:41, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes you are right, it will set to Automatically assessed {{{PROJECT}}} articles by default. I'm hesitant to just change it though because it may affect quite a lot of banners which already have the category in the current location ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:46, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

It would require help at WP:CFD, a mass speedy rename. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:17, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Don't forget |AUTO_ASSESS_CAT=; there is already the facility to customise this category. I agree that it should include the value of |ASSESSMENT_CAT= in the fallback chain, but we can probably make the change silently if we're careful. Happy‑melon 09:30, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Need help at template:WikiProject Middle Ages

Resolved

Happy‑melon 16:14, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Please see requests at Template talk:WikiProject Middle Ages#adding to wrong assessment categories. Thank you. --Funandtrvl (talk) 15:02, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Still has assessment problems, see: Template talk:WikiProject Middle Ages#Still has assessment problems. Thanks --Funandtrvl (talk) 17:52, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Please see: Template talk:WikiProject Middle Ages#Addendum. --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:35, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Could you add parameters to Template WikiProject Architecture

Just a request to add the full parameters to the WP Architecture template. Thanks. --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Created cats and updated doc. Just noticed that a File-Class cat is now there, which name are we supposed to use, Image or File, because the WPBM is still prompting for Image? Just curious --Funandtrvl (talk) 23:51, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

We might have crossed tracks while I was checking your banner: can you be a bit more specific (it looks OK to me). For the Image/File question, I don't think we have a standard yet! Physchim62 (talk) 23:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there are now two categories for images under WP Architecture, one that I created using the prompts (Image-Class) and one that MSGJ created later on (File-Class). Since these cats duplicate each other, just wondering which one should be changed to redirect to the other. --Funandtrvl (talk) 00:00, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I thin this needs a more specific header! Physchim62 (talk) 00:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC) (discussion continued below)

Funandtrvl simply replied in the wrong place. I'll copy this to Template talk:WikiProject Architecture. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 05:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Redundant parameters

I propose to deprecate the FULL_QUALITY_SCALE parameter in favour of QUALITY_SCALE=full. This could be done silently, while still supporting the current syntax by using something like

QUALITY_SCALE = {{#switch:{{{QUALITY_SCALE|}}}
                      |         = <!-- Null -->
                      |full     = full
                      |#default = {{#if:{{{FULL_QUALITY_SCALE|}}}|full|yes}}
                }}

We could do something similar with COMMENTS=force instead of COMMENTS_FORCE=yes.

This would shorten the code and simplify the syntax I think. Thoughts? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:41, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

If we're going to change the syntax, it ought to be a complete schema; that is, we should specify what value we want to activate the 'short' scale. Something like:

|QUALITY_SCALE = {{#switch:{{{QUALITY_SCALE|}}}
                      |         = <!-- Null -->
                      |short    = short
                      |full     = full
                      |#default = {{#if:{{{FULL_QUALITY_SCALE|}}}|full|short}}
                }}

Other than that, I can't see anything against it. Happy‑melon 09:12, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Excellent suggestion. And that leaves the way open for QUALITY_SCALE=medium (or something) later on :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:28, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Short ... or "standard"? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:29, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Just a question on this, instead of just checking for the existence of Template:BANNER/class, and using it automatically if it does exist, how about QUALITY_SCALE = custom ? One advantage of this is that currently, if a banner is editprotected, anyone can still come along & create a /class page and mess things up for that banner. Only using it if QUALITY_SCALE = custom would close that issue. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:43, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmn.... I agree that that's an attack vector for protected banners. But I don't want to think about the mess that would be created by transcluding a nonexistent custom mask. Perhaps what this parameter should be doing is acting as an override to any 'intelligence' in the banner; in that case we're looking at values of "no", "short"/"standard" (still not sure which is better there), "full" and "custom". And anything else is "auto" - the banner does its best to work out what is intended. We could do ¬ checking on |class= and actually do away with the requirement to set this parameter altogether: if class is passed through, we assume quality scale is active. Maybe. Thoughts? Happy‑melon 10:57, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I hadn't even thought of someone trying to use the class file as an attack vector during the last discussion. I guess this one will end up revisited after all :/ --Tothwolf (talk) 14:18, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

(e/c)I agree that it would be good not to check for a custom class unless class=custom. This would save a lot of ifexist calls and prevent possible disruption as WOS describes. In reply to H-M, no this will not work I think. In that case, if class wasn't defined by an instance of the banner, then the banner would not know whether quality scale was being used. (I thought about doing that exact thing in the past.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:22, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

We have the ability to differentiate between a banner that is passing the class parameter through and one that isn't:

{{WikiProject Tulips|class=<foo>}}
  --> {{WPBannerMeta|...|class={{{class|}}}|...}}
    --> {{WPBannerMeta/core|...|class={{{class|¬}}}|...}}
      --> class != ¬ for all foo, including undefined

{{WikiProject Tulips|class=<foo>}}
  --> {{WPBannerMeta|...|no class=|...}}
    --> {{WPBannerMeta/core|...|class={{{class|¬}}}|...}}
      --> class == ¬ for all foo

That's the whole principle of the ¬ chains - if they're broken at any point they pick up a unique value at the endpoint. We'd just need to set a default of ¬ in WPBM main and /core. Even ignoring WP:PERFORMANCE, the performance benefits of only using the custom mask with |QUALITY_SCALE=custom would be minimal because we would have to do the #ifexist: check on the custom mask anyway if told to use it; the results of not doing it would be too ugly to think about. And we have no need to ignore WP:PERFORMANCE; we can instead legitimately ignore performance :D. The proportion of banners using custom masks is about 10% now, and will only go upwards IMO. Usability has the higher priority.

I think we're agreed that |QUALITY_SCALE=custom should be expecting a custom mask, but what do we do when that mask does not exist?

Equally, banners with |QUALITY_SCALE=full/short should not use the custom mask even if it exists. We can do some pretty crazy things on /templatepage with the resources we have available; we could add a warning message only on protected templates suggesting that they switch to one of these values to close the attack vector. But I'm not convinced that removing the 'automagic' from the scale-selection process is a positive step. Happy‑melon 15:33, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

1. Hmm, I think that if class was defined empty then it wouldn't pick up a ¬ currently.
2. If custom is defined but there doesn't exist a custom mask then just use the standard scale I guess.
3. If we can make the code more efficient for 90% of banners, then why not?
4. Advising about an "attack vector" is WP:BEANS, isn't it? :P — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:52, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly the point. It'd take a few tweaks which we could probably do live (passing a default of ¬ to /class, and returning ¬=¬ in the #switch statement); the point is that the only way WPBM/core can ever receive |class=¬ is if the parameter is not passed through from the WikiProject banner at the end of the line, and so the default value of something-other-than-¬ is injected there.

I guess we'd have to, but that just reinforces this new |QUALITY_SCALE=custom as just another switch to flick in order to use a custom mask. We're not launching nuclear missiles here :D.

If it makes the code more efficient for 90% of banners, but makes life more difficult for 10% of users, then we shouldn't do it.

It would if I thought that any serious vandals actually watched this page :D. It's more important that we properly decide how best to close it than worry about its existence leaking. For the record, filling a custom mask with rubbish makes banners look like this. Irritating, but hardly devastating; and the vandalism will be at the top of the "related changes" link and can be quickly reverted. It's not actually as bad as I thought it would be; I expect transcluding a nonexistent mask would be worse.

In summary, I'm mainly concerned that adding "you must set |QUALITY_SCALE=custom" to the (currently very short) list of things you need to do to use a custom mask, is sacrificing ease of use for performance and for security against a threat that's not particularly severe. I fully agree that there should be a way to disable the use of a custom mask even if it exists; I think |QUALITY_SCALE=short/full should do that. I guess |QUALITY_SCALE=custom should "force" the use of a custom mask, although that's a fairly toothless assertion since we have to do existence checking and fall back to standard if it's not there. I just don't think we should lose the 'magic' from |QUALITY_SCALE=yes without good cause; if anything, we should be trying to make it more 'magical'. Happy‑melon 10:41, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the long reply. It's useful to hear what others are thinking. So if I'm reading this right, there is at least one point on which we all agree: if class has been set to standard/short or full then it shouldn't use a custom mask even if it exists. There are still a several other points to be ironed out. I anticpate being busy for the next couple of days, but after that I will try to set out the advantages and disadvantages of each approach that we have identified so far. About the ¬ thing, I guess you are right; I have to admit to never understanding fully what the ¬ thing was all about :) But I feel that whatever we decide with regards to QUALITY_SCALE is likely to make that consideration moot, so I suggest we forget about that for the time being. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:28, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Image-Class or File-Class?

Many projects have followed the guidelines and set up a Category:Image-Class XXX articles. Now the code appears to be prompting for a Category:File-Class XXX articles as well. Obviously both categories refer to the same type of page, so which naming convention should we use? My preference is for "File", as this matches the new(ish) name of the namespace. Physchim62 (talk) 00:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Currently, File-Class can only be achieved with a custom class mask, and it would be a lot of work to change the default behaviour because 550 categories would have to be created and another 550 deleted. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 05:13, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

However, I think that such a transition would probably be a constructive way to proceed. I agree that it would be a huge undertaking, and would have to be bot-assisted. I have approval for a bot script that could duplicate all the "Image-Class" categories as "File-Class", and then we could do one massive switch (and lots of little ones on the templates with custom masks) to change the categories over. I could write another script to go through all the then-empty Image-Class categories changing all WhatLinksHere to point to the File-Class ones, and then delete the old categories. However, while technically feasible it's still quite a noticeable change. Ignore the technical aspects: it can be done. Is it a "good idea"?? Happy‑melon 10:15, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Sure it is. :) Having already initiated a switch to File-Class it makes no sense to stop at this point. If you feel you need the thumbs up from a wider section of the community then that's fine, but there's no logic in continuing to have File-Class feed Image-Class categories. PC78 (talk) 14:52, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree, it is important to keep it consistent. If the category is now called "File-Class", then the automatic prompts from WPBM should be pointing to "File-Class", not "Image-Class", otherwise, it is too confusing. (For example, see discussion above concerning WP Archy). --Funandtrvl (talk) 15:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I also agree that we should move forward with this. But calling it low priority would be an overstatement in my opinion :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:24, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Just a comment. Since this banner started to use {{class}}, the classification does match the categorisation, which is probably appropriate. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:48, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Lotsa notes

Is there a limit on the number of notes which can be defined in the banner? I've got a somewhat specialized set of notes I'm trying to do over here, but they don't seem to be working. I'd like the section to be collapsed so it doesn't get too long, but I think I need some assistance with it. Thanks! ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 08:52, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

You can use up to five uncollapsed (note 1, note 2, etc.) and five collapsed (c note 1, c note 2, etc.) with the usual syntax. For more than that, you will need to use the hook: Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/notes which can either be attached using HOOK_NOTE (for uncollapsed) or HOOK_COLLAPSED (for collapsed). I'll come and look at what you're doing. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:56, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Aha. I figured there would be something like that. I appreciate any help. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 08:57, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

49 notes!!!?? This is ridiculous, frankly. Let me try to find a better way to do this. And I suggest working in the sandbox for now. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:59, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, like I said, "Lotsa notes". I've been trying to figure out a way which would be shorter, but I'm not big into programming. I can implement something someone makes, but can't always figure out how to do it myself. :)

One thing which is a special case here are these two categories: Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Hokkaidō and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Tokyo. Unlike the other related categories, they don't have "Prefecture" tacked onto the end. So, these two would require special code to accommodate that. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 09:08, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to reply on Template talk:WikiProject Japan. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Banner substitution

Could we perhaps brainstorm some ideas of detecting and preventing editors from substituting project banners? There must surely be a way to do this. I have been spending some time finding substituted {{WPAFC}} banners and there seem to over 200 of them. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:03, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I've done two templates: User:WOSlinker/Banner & User:WOSlinker/Banner/core to simulate Template:WPBannerMeta & Template:WPBannerMeta/core.

You then need to try normal transculsion & substituting the test banner on a test page:

{{User:WOSlinker/Banner|text=Test1}}
{{subst:User:WOSlinker/Banner|text=Test2}}

And you'll see a warning & an extra category used for the substituted version. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:26, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

That's all very well, but it's not {{WPBannerMeta}} that's being substituted (leaving direct calls to {{WPBannerMeta/core}} out in the wilderness). It's {{WikiProject Tulips}} being substituted to leave direct transclusions of {{WPBannerMeta}}; your idea would require each individual banner to implement the bulk of the anti-subst checks, with the extra difficulty of how to react to banners not correctly implementing the check. Could be tricky. But I admit, probably not as tricky as building a subst check system that is coded entirely in WPBM itself... :D Happy‑melon 16:57, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the check would need to be an extra parameter added to each banner (just like small, category & listas) but the checking part would be in WPBannerMeta. The extra parameter should be written so that if it's blank then the banner isn't using the checking option and no warnings would ever be shown. Each banner that wanted subst checking would need to add something similar to:

|substcheck = <includeonly>{{subst:</includeonly><includeonly>yesno|SUBST|SUBST}}</includeonly>

and then WPBannerMeta would need to check if the substcheck parameter was equal to SUBST and then display a warning message or add another category. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:07, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

That looks like a nice neat and easy way to do it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:47, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Shall we implement this? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:10, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

All it would take is adding

{{#ifeq:{{{substcheck|}}}|SUBST|[[Category:WikiProject banners with substitution issues|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}

in that bit at the end of WPBannerMeta (with possibly a better name for the category). Then project banners can opt-in if they want to. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:19, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Can we add an angry warning box as well? And what about simply Category:Substituted WikiProject banners? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:28, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Got a draft version of an angry box at Template:WPBannerMeta/substwarning. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:42, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

That looks ok. -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:41, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

{{#ifeq:{{{substcheck|}}}|SUBST|{{WPBannerMeta/substwarning}}}}

So is it better to display the warning as well as the banner or instead of? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:27, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Well I'm answering my own question and I decided that it's probably better to have it as well as. Therefore I suggest combining the two warnings pages into Template:WPBannerMeta/warnings and moving putting it on the main template instead of the core. I think we can use the existing category Category:WikiProject banners with formatting errors for both types of error (with different sort key). I have proposed code at Template:WPBannerMeta/sandbox. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:15, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and instead of using the {{yesno}} template, which creates a lot of mess when substituted, I suggest using a new one {{substcheck}} which just contains the word "SUBST". — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:17, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Last thing: there are demonstrations of all combinations of the warnings at User:MSGJ/Sandbox3 and User talk:MSGJ/Sandbox3. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:25, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmn, I wrote a response to the "as well as or instead of" question, also asking about why we were using {{yesno}}; seems to have got lost, but looks like you read my mind anyway! The warning look very good; I especially like the "Please replace it with this"... I just wonder if it's worth passing the |class= and |importance= parameters through so we can say "please replace it with this" and not have them lose any assessments in the process...? Would be impossible to do it for any of the trigger parameters that get renamed, but we could do it for those two... Otherwise, I love it! Happy‑melon 09:06, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Implemented. Hopefully there will be no problems ... Shall we add these to all the banners or just stick a information box on templatepage to advise of the new feature? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps we should be building a 'queue' of changes that need to be rolled out to the banners; then we can run occasional bot runs to implement whatever changes are waiting all at once, minimise disruption to people's watchlists. Happy‑melon 09:07, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Good idea. There might be a few things to do soon ... Umm, the substcheck syntax has wrecked the documentation layout because it's so long. I'm not sure how to fix it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:37, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I fixed it, but god knows what it'll look like on small screens (or wide screens for that matter) :D Happy‑melon 10:13, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately it looks horrible on IE :( — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:13, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

istemplate niggles

1. Regarding this edit, it was deliberate not a slip: I was thinking that it might be simpler if we could enfore that sandboxes must use the subpagename rather than their fullpagename. It is my most common error when copying a sandbox over :)
2. We seem to have a possible problem with /testcases pages. Unless category=no it is interpreted as templatepage which is not usually desirable. Would it be a good idea to put an exception for that in istemplate? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:13, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

/testcases should always be |category=no. If we included an exception in /istemplate for testcases not to be templatepages, then the locwarning message would start cropping up, telling them to set |category=no anyway. I'm not sure if it's worth it, although it could probably be done fairly elegantly. But what about /Testcases, /test, /testing, etc etc?? We can't make exceptions for all of them. Happy‑melon 18:58, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

subst testcases

I don't suppose anyone could offer a method for testing subst detection functionality that doesn't actually involve substing the tested template? The only methods I am aware of which could even come close are typing {{subst:templatename}} while editing a page and clicking "preview", or substing the template into another template (e.g. {{templatename/substtest}}) which is then transcluded onto a testpage, but neither of these are completely optimal (since they both require extra steps, and the one that actually saves something still substs and must thus be re-substed with new versions of the template). If anyone is curious, I'm wondering about this for Template:WikiProject Anime and manga/testcases (and yeah, I ripped the subst detection code from here ^_^ ). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:38, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry there's too many long words in that question so I can't answer :P But I have another question. Are you going to keep reinventing the wheel or are you going to convert that template to WPBM :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:14, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Would transcluding a different page consisting only of {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>templatename}} work? Dendodge _T\^C 19:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Maybe... I'd have to test, though. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 19:21, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

ASSESSMENT_CAT

On a similar note, it's been bugging me for some time that the syntax of |PROJECT= as it applies to categories, and |ASSESSMENT_CAT=, are not the same: in the latter case you have to append "articles". Every instance of ASSESSMENT_CAT has to include the word "articles", as all Category:FA-Class Foo articles cats have that word at the end. It's pointless, therefore, to have it as a separate parameter. We should change the syntax of |ASSESSMENT_CAT= to be just the "Foo" from "FA-Class Foo articles", just like |PROJECT= is. I'm reasonably confident that this can be done silently. If it can, is it a good idea? Happy‑melon 09:30, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Could we add a tracking parameter to find out how many projects do not have ASSESSMENT_CAT either undefined, or defined as PROJECT articles? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:57, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

None of them, unless you can find me a category in Category:FA-Class articles that doesn't end with "articles". Setting |ASSESMENT_CAT= to something other than "Foo articles" would change this value too, so no one is going to be doing it. I'll knock up a tracking cat for templates actually using the parameter at all. Happy‑melon 13:15, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

I've added a tracking cat Category:WPBannerMeta banners using ASSESSMENT_CAT that should catch all uses of an explicit |ASSESSMENT_CAT= parameter (unless it's set to PROJECT articles, of course), and hopefully will sort them by the index of the substring "articles" in the parameter value, which is pretty neat. Any that pop up sorted under "-1" need to be investigated more thoroughly. Happy‑melon 13:21, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

I used "pages" in {{WPAFC-admin}} because there are no articles :) When I said PROJECT above I was referring to the actual parameter name. Lots of different variations are used apart from PROJECT articles: PROJECT-related articles, WikiProject PROJECT articles, etc. etc. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:31, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Trus you to be responsible for the one anomaly :P I see what you mean, and while I don't like them, they are unavoidable, and the reason for the parameter in the first place. My point is that they all have the common feature of ending in "articles", so we can (assuming we can do it silently) move that part into WPBM proper and thus improve the consistency of the syntax. Happy‑melon 15:26, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, if it's only AFC that's the anomaly then I suppose I won't stand in the way :) But this seems like one of those situations where it would have been better to do something differently in hindsight but perhaps not worth the bother in changing it. I hope you don't mind me saying, but the COMMENT -> COMMENTS change has got to be the biggest waste of expert template coders time ever! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:18, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks like it's only AfC and the mysterious WikiProject Editing trends that use anything other than "articles". I largely agree with you, this would have been much easier a long time ago. But it's the little things that make the big things happen :D Happy‑melon 10:16, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay, WPAFC won't stand in the way of progress ;) By the way, I thought I'd offended you there for a while. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:24, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

What, by calling me an expert template coder? Yes, mortally :D. Now watch how much time I waste on the Image → File conversion! Happy‑melon 18:59, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Help with peer review hook

There was an error with the title parameter of the peer review hook. I tried to fix it but it's not working correctly yet. We've got

{{SUBJECTPAGENAME{{#if:{{{title|}}}|:{{{title}}}}}}}

The problem is that the colon is acting as an indent for some reason. Help please. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:59, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

One possible way might be to do this. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:01, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

{{SUBJECTPAGENAME:{{#if:{{{title|}}}|{{{title}}}|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}

That should be safe. What is the problem, exactly? It can probably be filed as a bug. Happy‑melon 14:10, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I tried to explain as best I could ... the colon in :{{{title}}} is interpreted as a paragraph indent rather than a colon which the magic word requires. Therefore the output looks like

{{SUBJECTPAGENAME

something}}

and the magic word doesn't get parsed properly. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:16, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

WTF!?! That's crazy! Happy‑melon 15:34, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, this is actually a bug that affects all characters which are used to denote list wikimarkup, and one I've bashed my head against trying to fix more than once (unfortunately, there are often cases where simply enclosing it in <nowiki/> tags won't work, such as the above (I think)). I have the distinct feeling that the only reason other markup doesn't do this as well is because list wikimarkup is really the only type that requires a single character to trip the parser. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:44, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

sandbox notice

Just wondering what people think about automatically adding a notice to the sandbox versions of the banner templates. Putting the following at the top of Template:WPBannerMeta/templatepage would do it.

{{#ifeq:{{lc:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}|sandbox|{{Template sandbox notice}}}}

-- WOSlinker (talk) 17:52, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Go for it! —Ms2ger (talk) 18:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Done. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:09, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Reassessment flag?

Any idea how common they are, or how wanted they would be by the general project population? WP:USRD has one, and I was thinking of adding one to WP:CFB via a note parameter. But it made me wonder; if this is a pretty common feature, perhaps it could be something that goes into the base, much like "attention=" and "needs-infobox". We could have "reassess=", which puts articles into "Category:<project> articles needing reassessment". Any thoughts? DeFaultRyan 14:48, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

In my experience this is not a very widely used feature, so I would suggest a note. However, I was going to suggest image-needed as a general feature because these are very common. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:16, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info on both counts. Gonna request the note for WP:CFB. DeFaultRyan 16:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Adding 3 more taskforces to the physics template.

Since this would total more than 5 taskforces, and that the documentation on hooks (whatever that is) is 1024 bit encrypted chinese voodoo to me, could someone implement things how they should be implemented?

The three parameters would be |bio= |pub= and |hist=. The final behaviour should be identical to the other taskforces (full assessment scale). Relevant categories would be physics biographies, physics publications, and physics history (capitalized in the same way as the other taskforces). The name of the taskforces would be Biographies Taskforce, Publications Taskforce and History Taskforce, but they would all link to WikiPedia:WikiProject Physics/Taskforces/BPH. Thanks. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 19:04, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Hooks are reasonably simple if you know what you're looking at, although I agree they're not nearly as intuitive as the 'basic' code. I've added the two hooks that you need for the third extra taskforce; now you can just fill in the various parameters as usual. Hope this helps, Happy‑melon 19:14, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Alright thanks. I think I got it right.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 19:33, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

C- and B-Class assessments

For a while, if all the B-Class criteria weren't filled in and marked as "yes", the articles were listed as C-Class even if they had been assessed as "class=B". Now it just lists them as B-Class even if the B-Class criteria aren't filled in and marked "yes". Is this a change to {{WPBannerMeta}}, or did something weird happen to {{WikiProject Japan}}? I can't see anything in the code for {{WikiProject Japan}} which would do this. Thanks for any help! ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 17:24, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah, that would be the code in your custom class mask Template:WikiProject Japan/class. Probably occured from when Redirect-Class was implemented on your banner. I'll come and fix ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:26, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed. Apologies from Happy-Melon. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:38, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Shit, I need to slow down a bit. Sorry about that, guys. Happy‑melon 18:19, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, it's "ok", I didn't screw up when I thought I did (when I blitzed about five banners in half an hour). Full steam ahead then :D Happy‑melon 18:24, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I just noticed it that last week or so and was waiting to see if it might fix itself (as some things have done with the banner). :) ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 18:26, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Economics

There are a couple of problems with this template, can you help with fixing the codes?

1. At File talk:Basic price ceiling.svg, even though it is categorized correctly into NA-Class and NA-importance, the Unassessed-Class, Unassessed-importance Economics articles cat still shows up. Does one have to use the class & importance tags all the time with this template? Is there a way to eliminate that?

2. At Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics, (the main page, not the talk page) even though the displayed banner is using category=no, the Unassessed-Class, Unassessed-importance Economics articles cat is still showing up. Is there anyway to fix this? Thanks --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:40, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

That intersection category is not part of WPBM; it's tacked on the bottom of the template. As such, it doesn't have all the careful fallbacks and normalisation that the categories that come out of the 'main' banner get. I've added a |category= optout so your second example should be fixed. You could fix the first by duplicating the namespace switch from {{WPBannerMeta/class}}. It's a shame we can't pass the normalised values (the values for |class= and |importance= after WPBM has done its magic) back out to hooks like these, but it's just not feasible; as the devs keep saying, wikitext is a markup, not a programming language. Unfortunately. Happy‑melon 22:24, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I've made some changes to do the categories. Hope they are ok. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:07, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I've often thought that it should be possible to pass the name of the hook through, and then set up the core to call the hook and pass the required parameters ... By the way, don't forget we have Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect for this purpose, although I think the order of the words is different in this case. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:49, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

That would be ok if we knew for sure what parameters would be needed. But what happens when a banner needs to call /hooks/taskforces five times from |HOOK_TF= because they've got some ridiculous number of taskforces? If we could set up an 'environment' where |class= was 'initialised' to the normalised value, it would be fine; you can do that in most programming languages (or rather, the hook calls a given function with a particular set of parameters, which then creates a scope in which you can call other functions as many times as you like with those parameter values), but wikitext is most definitely not a programming language, and the devs are determined to keep it that way. You could do it in a similar fashion to the custom masks - WPBM looks for a {{WikiProject Tulips/HOOK_TF}} subtemplate and, if it exists, transcludes it in the right location with the normalised values - but that seems needlessly complicated for such a small benefit. Happy‑melon 12:16, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

That's where I copied some of the code from. :) If you would expand Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect by adding another parameter to offer a number of different layout choices for the Category names then I could change the banner to use it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:15, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all of your team's help, I think both problems are now fixed, the category=no works now and the NA-Class, NA-importance category is populating correctly! --Funandtrvl (talk) 01:00, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll have a look at allowing some other options. Are there any other possible formats? We've got

• XX-Class TOPIC articles of YY-importance
• XX-Class, YY-importance TOPIC articles

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:29, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Here's the list I've spotted when looking through the categories:

1. XX-Class TOPIC articles of YY-importance (68 occurences)
2. XX-Class, YY-importance TOPIC articles (1 occurence)
3. XX-Class YY-importance TOPIC articles (5 occurences)
4. YY-importance XX-Class TOPIC articles (3 occurences)

(see User:WOSlinker/qualimpintersect for full list) -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:50, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay how about we have a parameter FORMAT and possible values:

1. CTI (default)
2. C,IT
3. CIT
4. ICT

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:29, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good, although the first one should probably be CTofI rather than CTI. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:50, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Ha ha. Okay, you nitpicker :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:51, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Can you check my code in Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect/sandbox. There are testcases at Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect/testcases. Thanks. I had to use two cores to do it efficiently :| — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

It was just about perfect. Had to change Unassessed to Unassessed-Class in core though as they all seemed to need it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:10, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Really? There is no Unassessed TOPIC of YY importance? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:29, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Taking another look through the categories, there's actually a mixture of the two but most seem to be Unassessed-Class. Below are the ones which I spotted which are just Unassessed.

• Unassessed Astronomy articles of High-importance
• Unassessed Cape Verde articles of High-importance
• Unassessed China-related articles of High-importance
• Unassessed Dungeons & Dragons articles of Bottom-importance
• Unassessed cricket articles of High-importance
• Unassessed glass articles of Unknown-importance
• Unassessed physics articles of High-importance
• Link to the Unassessed-Class ones

Might be needing another parameter to allow for both Unassessed & Unassessed-Class (defaulting to Unassessed-Class if not specified) ! -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:48, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay this is getting ridiculous. We could have up to 8 different naming schemes here. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:53, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I know! -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:11, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Tell me about it, especially when the projects haven't yet created all the (exponentially increasing number of) categories!! Since 'XX-Class TOPIC articles of YY-importance' seems to be used the most, I vote for standardizing the format to that form, and using 'Unassessed-Class', instead of just 'Unassessed...', because it makes sense and follows the pattern of the other categories' names. If you are able to do this, is there a way to redirect the categories using unstandardized names to categories using the standardized naming form, w/o having to cat redirect each one manually? --Funandtrvl (talk) 21:14, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

And to think the whole system will become redundant when we get WP bot 2.0... :D It's good that we're supporting this in the meantime, though, even if it is a bit of a bitch to accomodate. How many categories are affected? I certainly have a BRFA approval to create the new categories, although redirecting the old ones by bot might be too controversial. Happy‑melon 21:28, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Good point, heaven forbid if we should cause a controversy!! :) Well, if we could at least set it up, so it'll be in some standardized form for new category creations from this day forward, and the projects can work on cat redirects, if necessary. I leave it in your capable hands! --Funandtrvl (talk) 22:18, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay we now have another parameter UNASSESSED_APPENDIX for specifying whether or not -Class appears after Unassessed. I suggest that the default should be blank though - we should surely be encouraging consistency with the usual Class categories. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:59, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

 Implemented. Please test it out and let me know of any problems. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:10, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Important: Just noticed that the main template page (not the talk page) is getting placed into Category:Unassessed-Class, Unknown-importance Economics articles. Something must be broken again, please help! --Funandtrvl (talk) 17:14, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed, along with a few other bits and pieces in the code. Nice code, Martin, shame you left the "/sandbox" declarations in :P Happy‑melon 20:41, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Minimal width

I just noticed theres several banners (eg: {{WPMED}} and {{WPCouncil}} (The latter being able to be seen on this talk page)) that don't appear to go the full width and only to the size that is required by the content contained within, is there anyway to fix that since it looks messy when several are stacked together? Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 09:47, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks perfect on my browser. Which are you using? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:50, 27 April 2009 (UTC)]

Both Firefox (3.0.9) and IE 7 on windows XP. Here are some screenshots in Firefox and IE (Sorry for the non compress, only have paint on here since its a fresh reinstall). Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 10:11, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

You can actually save from paint as .png. Not a problem, though. Happy‑melon 12:20, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, spray-on condoms, what next? I don't understand the issue you are having because I've tested it on FF3.0.9 and IE7 as well and I see

1. Perfect alignment on this page;
2. Slightly-off on Talk:Spray-on condom, but it's only a millimetre if that. Likely to be because Template:WP Sexuality doesn't use this meta template yet. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:20, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmn, actually I have seen that before, when testing new CollapsibleTables code on test.wiki. I dismissed it as an artefact of being in a different environment without most of the CSS/JS here, but maybe it is an genuine problem. How widespread is the problem, and can anyone find examples where it's not, or not just, the first banner that's affected? Happy‑melon 12:19, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Based on those screenshots, it may be that Peachey has a really wide monitor and so the page is behaving differently to what I/we see. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:24, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm using a 22" @ 1680x1050 (widescreen i believe) here, although i can't find many others that are affected because most of the pages/articles i've check have theirs collapsed into WPB or WPBS, although I will keep an eye out. Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 12:56, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I think the problem has to do with using MAIN_TEXT variable. {{WikiProject Anatomy}} had a reduced width when it used the MAIN_TEXT variable (as evident here). Then, I removed the MAIN_TEXT value, and it now displays as expected. I see the problem in both Firefox 3.0.9 and IE 7 on Windows Vista. --Scott Alter 18:49, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay I can definitely reproduce this one. I've put a version on Template:WikiProject Anatomy/sandbox which is far too narrow. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:05, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've narrowed it down to the edit of {{td}} to fix an issue with the collapsible sections and IE (Template_talk:WPBannerMeta/Archive_3#Weird_display_error_with_collapsed_section). Not really sure how to fix this issue though. Will have to leave for Happy Melon to look at. -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:48, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Some more "discoveries".

This edit in the sandbox seems to fix it. But there's probably a better way to do it.

Look at the code below. Why doesn't it work when colspan=3 (on Firefox) ?

<table class="tmbox tmbox-notice"><tr>
<td style="width:1px;"></td>
<td class="mbox-text" colspan="##">Text</td>
</tr></table>

-- WOSlinker (talk) 21:11, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh for god's sake, I thought this was over. I'll take a look tomorrow. Happy‑melon 23:19, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Hmn, this is thoroughly perverse. Well spotted on the colspan=3, WOSlinker; wierd though it is, it makes it much easier to resolve. Although it probably qualifies as a Firefox bug (do people see it on other browsers?); maybe I'll file it over at their bugzilla. Is the version in the sandbox with colspan=4 now free of the issue? Happy‑melon 12:34, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Anatomy/sandbox looks ok now when switched to use the WPBannerMeta/sandbox. I've put a reduced case in User:WOSlinker/tablebug for if you want to file a bug on bugzilla. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:09, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks okay on FF, but still the same on IE. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:17, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

And now? I think I found the problem with the fix :D Happy‑melon 15:36, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Looking good from here ... Congratulations. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:27, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Is this related? Template:ChicagoWikiProject doesn't show up properly for me. I'm using Firefox 3 and Windows XP Professional. Screen: File:ChicagoWikiProject WPBM screen.PNG. Borgarde (talk) 15:14, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's the same issue I think. I think Happy-melon has fixed it - just waiting for the fix to be applied to the live version! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Well what are we waiting for!?! :D  Fixed, I hope. Happy‑melon 16:00, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

So the cause of this error was the fix for the last error, right? So I'm waiting for a group of people using another browser to turn up here complaining now :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Yeah. I'm seriously impressed by the way the hounds have pounced over at Mozilla bugzilla: I posted WOSlinker's code and linked to this discussion; the first guy gave the standard I-can't-see-it-you-must-be-a-noob, but within five hours they'd confirmed it on three operating systems and four Firefox builds, and six hours after that'd they'd tied it to a floating point error in six lines of code. I wish our devs were always that hyperactive :D So pretty soon it'll just be yet another thing wrong with IE... Happy‑melon 22:23, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Need help at Template:Cat class

Please see the above, need help there. --Funandtrvl (talk) 21:05, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:Ice hockey

See: Category talk:Indianapolis Ice, I know that the banner isn't changed yet to WPBM and they don't use the FQS, but the current settings are not putting the 'NA' class articles, like categories, into a NA-Class category, instead they're all going into Unassessed articles. Since this is a totally protected template, can you fix this for us? Thanks --Funandtrvl (talk) 03:03, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

please also change the cat names in the following code to the updated, standardized ones, using List-Class Ice Hockey articles and NA-Class Ice Hockey articles.

|NA=[[Category:Non-article Ice Hockey pages|{{PAGENAME}}]] |list |List=[[Category:List-Class Ice Hockey pages|{{PAGENAME}}]]

Probably easier just to convert it. Do you want to write the code in the sandbox, or I could do it ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:44, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I've just done a WPBannerMeta sandbox version, but it still needs a little more work & checking before it can be used. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:11, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it's ready to go now. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:43, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Since Category:Automatically assessed Ice Hockey articles is completely empty, I propose to remove the auto= parameter from the template. --Funandtrvl (talk) 17:31, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

This should be on all templates as now and then we send bots through to asess...and then eventually people go through and adjust manually. You should also bring these things up at the talk page for the actual template. Being that the template belongs to you know a specific wikiproject. -Djsasso (talk) 18:47, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflicts) While that would be appropriate, please keep WP:OWN in mind. —Ms2ger (talk) 19:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean belong in the own sense. I meant belongs as in its a template to tag articles used by that project. It seemed like this was an end road around asking what a specific project wants to do with the banner it uses. I only mention it because I notice he keeps changing projects banners and a number of projects put alot of work and discussion into whats on their banners so its bad form to change them without discussing it. -Djsasso (talk) 19:37, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, he (she?) is only trying to help (noticed the error in your template which started this whole thread!), but I have had to mention this eagerness to change settings without consultation. I agree that Template talk:Ice hockey is the place for these discussions. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 00:07, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Well thank you Martin for sticking up for me!! (and it's a she, not a he.) Yes, it is correct that the project's template in its previous form did not work correctly, which was my purpose & goal in getting it fixed in the first place. You have to forgive me because sometimes I'm too eager to get things fixed quickly, having no patience sometimes with the "decision by consensus" process, since the definition of a committee trying to get a consensus can sometimes be: "A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours". Secondly, concerning the discussion at WT:HOCKEY, will you please let me know how much time is the "proper" time to allow, considering that members have said, "then that is not bad" to adding the FQS, before an action can be taken? (So that I can avoid being criticized for wanting to get the job done.) Thank you, I appreciate it. --Funandtrvl (talk) 04:05, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

It's not quite as straightforward as you think. I've replied at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:42, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Proper time for any kind of major change that affects many articles, as a banner change does is usually 7 days, just like an afd as not everyone edits every day. WP:HOCKEY is probably one of the most organized wikiprojects on wikipedia so they (we) are big on discussion, very rarely do major changes happen "overnight" so to speak. Some take months, the odd one years. There is no rush to fix things like this, very few people I would guess find articles via the assessment categories except other editors. To be honest when you first posted that it was broken I went and checked but didn't see the error you were talking about, so as far as I could see it was working correctly. -Djsasso (talk) 14:02, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I think I see what you are calling broken now, you were putting a Category class into the template when we don't use Category class which is why it was putting it into unassessed. That was actually working correctly, we want incorrectly tagged banners to go into unassessed so we can fix them. Because you used the Category class you incorrectly tagged the article. The article was already tagged NA so I am not sure why you tried to change it to Category class anyways. -Djsasso (talk) 14:16, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, it was behaving somewhat erratically because it was displaying "Category-Class" but it didn't categorise in this way. You would expect the categorisation to match the classification, that's all. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:41, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it would have displayed anything you typed in as a class. Didn't have a fail safe in it to prevent incorrect tags. I didn't do the original coding as I still haven't fully figured out wikicode. I mostly just maintained what was there when we changed things. -Djsasso (talk) 14:48, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

How exactly is the auto parameter supposed to work? If it is placed on the talk page within the ice hockey template, it is only duplicating what the class=Stub is doing. Does the auto parameter in the WPBM code place an article's talk page into the automatically assessed category, right away, when the ice-hockey-stub template is used on the article's main page? If so, then I can see the use for the category. If it doesn't, then the auto assess category and the auto=yes parameter are just duplications of what the class=Stub parameter is doing, and it then requires you to use both the class=Stub and auto=yes, which is redundant. --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The auto parameter is used when a bot goes through talk pages and sees that another project has rated the page as a stub then it automatically assumes that the hockey project also thinks it is a stub. The page is than rated as a stub by the bot and placed in the auto=yes category meaning a human didn't decide that the article was a stub. At which point humans go through and confirm if the page is a stub or not. Remember different projects can rate articles at different levels. -Djsasso (talk) 19:23, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

So it doesn't work off the main article page's stub template, it still has to be placed as an addition to the WP ice hockey template? Then, in that case, it's usefulness is limited to talk pages that have already been tagged by the project, but have not yet been rated for the quality scale, and that have been tagged by another WP project as a stub, with ice hockey having included the auto parameter? --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:31, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes it works on pages already tagged with Ice hockey and that are unassessed. The bot goes through and it checks other projects tags to see what the other projects have asessed the article as. It then changes the assessment on the ice hockey template to match the other wikiprojects and sets auto=yes so that we know it was a bot that changed the assessment and not a human. Basically so a human can come along later and review the bots assumptions. It is used basically to speed up the assessment process so we don't have so many unassessed articles for so long. -Djsasso (talk) 19:35, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay, then I withdraw my rqst to eliminate the category; however, I request that the full quality scale be added to the template. Thanks --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Yup, that will be up to the outcome of the discussion that was started at WP:HOCKEY. Full scale is up to the projects themselves, especially when it comes to the template classes etc because some projects use categories to group templates on the actual templace space page instead of on the talk page. Which allows for a more broken down category tree. -Djsasso (talk) 20:01, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but I explained the advantages of adding FQS at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey#Full Quality Scale to Project Banner Template, because it will allow you to check if any templates are missing from Category:Ice hockey templates, by comparing the two categories side-by-side by using (Category:Template-Class Ice Hockey articles). --Funandtrvl (talk) 20:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Category prompting

When constructing banners with large numbers of taskforces, it is useful to construct as "main taskforces", check the categories exist, and then "hook" them. Obviously the hooked ones come in tens, so it would be helpful if templatepage would prompt for the categories of 10 taskforces. Is there anything I have overlooked? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah. I'm now triggering Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls with all these ifexist calls. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:00, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Anime and manga

Reinventing?! I don't know what you're talking about! I'm trying to make a square wheel! =D But in any case, the reason I haven't converted yet is because we're doing some stuff with our B-class checklist that AFAIK WPBannerMeta can't do (and *not* because I really like being able to root around in the raw code, honest!). That being said, I haven't taken the time yet to study in detail just what WPBM *is* capable of, so do you want to surprise me? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 19:21, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, tell me what you're doing with your B-checklist and I'll bet we can do it with WPBM. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:29, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

It's a bit complicated...

• class=Start
  • B1-B6=N/unset - class stays at Start (B-Class checklist gets displayed only if one or more of B1-B6 contains *something*)
  • B1-B6=Y - class upgrades to B
  • B1-B6=various - class upgrades to C
• class=C/B
  • B1-B6=N/unset - class at C
  • B1-B6=Y - class at B
  • B1-B6=various - class at C

You may also want to have a look at the source of Template:WikiProject Anime and manga/B check and some of the testcases. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 19:37, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Seems like with the simple addition of a custom class mask, WPBM would work. Just take the code you are using for the b-checklist, drop it in the mask, and you're good to go. Anything else? DeFaultRyan 20:06, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Dino, check your sandbox and testcases ;) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Yep, so I saw. =) There are still a few issues relating to some esoteric assessments the current banner does (I think the only two are that it allows templates and categories to both be tagged as redirects, and that it allows project pages to be tagged as templates (and automatically does so if they are a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Anime and manga/Userbox)), the current banner uses some custom assessment categories (Category:WikiProject Anime and manga templates, for instance), and there may be a few other details to suss out; I'm thinking really hard on just what this switch might inadvertently change (of course, we're not ready for it yet, all the task forces and other extras still have to be added). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 20:25, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

... 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 03:09, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Hey. You have complete control over the quality assessment by editing Template:WikiProject Anime and manga/class. Currently there is no namespace detection in it so will just display whatever class you enter. I'm sorry, there is no way to avoid using categories like Category:Template-Class manga articles, as this template uses {{class}} and we've discussed this at Template talk:class! If you wanted to populate Category:WikiProject Anime and manga templates as well, then the best way is probably to use a note without visible output. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 05:09, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Is there any way for me to make it work with the full assessment scale (FULL_QUALITY_SCALE), or am I going to have to just hack it together in {{ANIME/class}}? Also, could you more clearly explain what you mean by using an "empty" note (had a 12-hour shift today for which I was up at 5:30, and it's after midnight now, so not thinking so clearly... need to go to bed already ;P )? Also, I suppose now is about as good a time as any to start discussing the various taskforces and other notes. My major concerns are the merge and split ones, due to having them set up to be able to accommodate targets, via mergeto, mergefrom, and splitto. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 05:26, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I've added an example to show what I mean. But I think it would be better to just redirect this to the new category. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 05:41, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

All right, that seems easy enough. But right now, I'm more worried about the assessment itself - like I said, will I have to fool with the /class filter to get other namespaces assessing correctly, or is there any way to automate most of it with FULL_QUALITY_SCALE in this particular case? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 05:47, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

All the classes you want need to be defined in there. See Template:WPAFC/class for a typical one, which uses namespace detection if no class is entered. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 05:55, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

All right, looks simple enough. I'll knock it together in the sandbox in a second, then. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 06:44, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

G.A.S has pointed out several other issues for the conversion at Template talk:WikiProject Anime and manga#Moved from Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Dinoguy1000. Would you, Happy-melon, or WOSlinker (or some combination of the three of you) care to go have a look and comment? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

On my way ... yeah that's probably a better place to discuss these technical issues rather than on your RfA :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:25, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Blocking the categorisation

Hi there ! For the WikiProject Chess I have created all the "Category:Foo-Class chess articles of Zut-importance" (e.g. Category:FA-Class chess articles of High-importance, Category:B-Class chess articles of Bottom-importance, ...) and the Template:Chess-WikiProject has been changed to add the corresponding category with the following code:

|HOOK_BOTTOM = {{#ifeq:{{{BANNER_NAME|Template:Chess-WikiProject}}}|{{FULLPAGENAME}}||{{#ifeq:{{{category|¬}}}|¬|[[Category:{{#if:{{{class|}}}|{{{class}}}-Class|Unassessed}} chess articles of {{{importance}}}-importance|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}}}}}

Also, the "Category:Foo-Class chess articles of Zut-importance" is made a subcategory of both "Category:Foo-Class chess articles" and "Category:Zut-importance chess articles".

But now the "Category:Foo-Class chess articles" will contain a given article twice:

• once because the Template:Chess-WikiProject automatically tags the article with "Category:Foo-Class chess articles",
• and once because the Template:Chess-WikiProject automatically tags the article with "Category:Foo-Class chess articles of Zut-importance", which is a subcategory of "Category:Foo-Class chess articles".

What I would like is to impeach the Template:Chess-WikiProject to add the tags "Category:Foo-Class chess articles" and "Category:Zut-importance chess articles", so that it only adds the tag "Category:Foo-Class chess articles of Zut-importance". Any idea on the safest and easiest way to do that ? SyG (talk) 11:54, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

1. Are you sure you want to impeach your template? :)
2. Your code is pretty good, but we have a "hook" especially for this purpose. You might like to have a look at Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect for a neater way to achieve this. At the moment, your code will fail if the editor does not use an capital initial letter for importance (e.g. top instead of Top). There are probably other issues as well.
3. I don't think we have a way to prevent categorisation in the class and importance categories and I don't think it would be a good idea anyway. For one, the WP 1.0 bot uses these to compile the statistics for your project. (This page wouldn't work if you didn't populate those categories.) All the other projects which use category intersection also categorise in the normal categories.
4. By the way QUALITY_SCALE = no currently acts the same way as QUALITY_SCALE = yes! You have to remove the parameter to stop it.

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:15, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

In the not-too-distant future, the bot that generates those neat stats tables is going to be updated; the new code (currently being tested) will do catgory intersections automatically. So each number in that table will become a link to a dynamically-generated list of intersections, without needing to maintain any of the intersection cats manually. So dropping the individual cats in favour of intersections won't just break the existing system, it'll be redundant to the new system; so you'd just have to reverse it when that new version comes out anyway. See User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation for more details. Happy‑melon 12:29, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

A bot is NOT required to create those neat stats tables, you can do it already with PAGESINCATEGORY, see User:SunCreator/Test_Page3. SunCreator (talk) 12:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand the advantages of adding categories to "Category:Foo-Class articles of Zut-importance". Why create these categories(I mean the category on the category page it, not the category itself). Is not a solution to remove them all? Then you'll not have the duplication. It seemed fine before without them. Perhaps I am missing something. SunCreator (talk) 12:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all your answers ! Here are some reactions:

• To Martin: thanks for the hint about Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualimpintersect, I have implemented it in Template:Chess-WikiProject now. (but I still need to test it a bit, especially the very valuable upper/lower case stuff)
• To Martin and Happy-melon: we at the Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess have been using WP 1.0 bot for years now, so we are very happy and grateful for it. But now we are wondering if we should really continue to use a bot when, as SunCreator mentions, the normal function PAGESINCATEGORY can do the same in real-time with more flexibility. I have read User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation but I am still musing about the actual need for it for our WikiProject, as we do not have taskforces and things like that. In essence, do we still need the bot-generated Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chess articles by quality statistics once we have the bot-free Wikipedia:WikiProject Chess/Assessment statistics ?
• To SunCreator (and others): my understanding of the "Category" concept is that the more organised they are, the better. I thought they were meant to be a very pyramidal structure, hence my desire to have "Category:Foo-Class articles" contain all subcategories like "Category:Foo-Class articles of Zut-importance", so that "Category:Foo-Class articles of Zut-importance" is not uncategorised. Am I misled ?

SyG (talk) 13:25, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

To maintain the pyramid of organised categories how about instead putting them in Category:Chess articles by quality and Category:Chess_articles_by_importance. SunCreator (talk) 13:37, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

1. SyG, I need to do some work on your template because unfortunately that hook does not work with weird importance scales. (Bottom-importance is interpreted as Unknown-importance now.) Feel free to remind me if I haven't done it in a couple of days.
2. Yes you can do the pretty tables using PAGESINCAT but you can't do the quality log that I linked to earlier, and this is one of the main functions of the bot. And please reread Happy-melon's advice: the new bot will be here sometime ...
3. Perhaps you two would like to continue the discussion about the categorisation on your project talk?

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:53, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

The WP1.0 bot has run for years, and now maintains lists of 2 million articles for eight hundred projects. While I agree that the PAGESINCATEGORY magic word offers in principle a real-time update, this is in reality not usually true given the vagarities of the job queue and page caching. But I do not agree that the system you propose offers any greater flexibility; if anything, it offers less. The WP 1.0 bot currently generates logs and a priority worlist that track the evolution of your project's articles over time. You can see for yourself what the second generation bot will be like (this is obviously a alpha-phase, expect bugs at this stage): as well as overall stats, intersections are generated dynamically, including the timestamp and version link to when the assessment was made, and logs on a per-project or per-page basis, showing the evolution of the article's rating over time. Historical graphs of how a project's articles have improved are likely to follow; and you can see how WPChess is doing in comparison to other projects at ensuring a thorough coverage of article assessments, for both quality and importance.

That's all the stuff that the WP1.0 team can do for your project. The 1.0 assessment scheme, as the name suggests, is not just about WikiProjects. The 1.0 Editorial Team is responsible for creating static releases of Wikipedia: online stable archives, DVDs, and even printed books. The Assessment Scheme is how the Editorial Team identify articles that are of a high-enough quality to be included in such static media: articles are assigned a weighting based on their ratings for quality and importance, and articles that receive a high-enough ranking get automatically compiled by a bot script, reviewed for quality and 'cleanliness', and compiled into the final release. So in one sense it's very simple: if no Chess-related articles are assessed on the 1.0 Assessment Scheme, no Chess articles will be considered for static releases. Of course, if articles happen to also be assessed by another project that does use the assessment scheme, then they may still be included, but many may not. For instance, Rules of chess would be excluded automatically, and articles like Emanuel Lasker, despite being assessed by numerous other projects, probably wouldn't be identified either because the other projects have marked it as low-priority. And yet you are using the 1.0 Assessment Scheme, to the letter! Electing to go through the process of assessing and maintaining articles, yet not to take advantage of the benefits that that entails, both to WPChess and to Wikipedia in general, seems fundamentally misguided. Happy‑melon 15:21, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

To Happy-melon: Thanks for your detailed explanations, now I see much more clearly what the new version of the bot will do. Sorry I did not explain myself clearly, my intention was not to abandon the assessment scheme, but simply to use directly the PAGESINCAT to manage the assessment table. As you notice, there are many other things the bot does and will do, so probably we will use both in parallel (I mean, the PAGESINCAT for the table and the bot for the other stuff, notably the log) until the 2nd version of the bot is alive, and fully switch to the bot then.

To Martin: sorry to be such a pain with the Bottom-class, which is indeed the class why we have all these problems in the first place. I do not want to give you more work, you probably have much more important features to develop. So maybe if I just revert to the former code, however inelegant, it will work correctly ?

SyG (talk) 16:33, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Redirect-Class

One thing leads to another, and I find myself deciding to sort this issue out properly. We currently support Redirect-Class as an extended quality scale assessment. This obviously requires all projects that use the extended quality scale to create and maintain a Redirect-Class Foo articles category; you can see that a significant number of the categories are created with the standard WPBM preloaded edit summary: they were created from the prompts below a WPBM banner. There are currently some 370-odd of these categories, of which 168 are completely empty and over 300 of which contain less than ten articles. Of the ten thousand pages marked as Redirect-Class, over 80% of them are assessed by just 15 projects. This seems to me to be indicative of a class that is very 'niche', and is only properly and correctly used by a tiny minority of projects, in the same manner as Current-Class and Future-Class. I am inclined, therefore, to treat Redirect-Class in the same manner as these other classes: easily accessible through a custom mask, but not something we should be 'inflicting' on every project that uses the extended quality scale. Thoughts? Happy‑melon 18:57, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Absolute and total agreement. I've never seen the point of Redirect-Class myself but, if you say that some projects are using it, I wouldn't want to stop them. Most projects can't be bothered, or don't have redirects which are THAT important. Physchim62 (talk) 20:49, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

I agree. In my opinion redirects shouldn't ever have talk pages, but that's another matter altogether. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 22:03, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it would be better if more projects did keep track of redirects but most probably don't even know how to use them efficiently. Categorized and subtopic redirects in particular are often not updated and maintained properly when editors make major changes to the articles that they redirect to. For WP:WPIRC, I've sifted out most of the redirects and placed them on a project subpage but I've not yet reworked all the article redirects and tagged them. In terms of numbers, for this project, there probably are as many redirects as there are actual articles. Tothwolf (talk) 23:39, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

A random sampling of categories suggests to me that Portal-Class, Image-Class and Project-Class (maybe others?) have a similar or lower level of usage than Redirect-Class. (Side question: Why are we still creating Image-Class categories? Have we not yet fully switched over to File-Class?) Personally I think you should scrap the extended quality scale altogether and then projects can pick and choose exactly what they want to use. At the very least I think it needs a rethink above and beyond the inclusion of Redirect-Class. PC78 (talk) 09:27, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

But unlike Redirect-Class, those classes can be automatically assigned by namespace: all the project has to do is tag the relevant pages. It is a difference, I'm not sure if it is a fundamental one. I agree that it's an issue that probably needs to be looked at again.

Transitioning from Image-Class to File-Class is possible, but is a big step that will require us to switch the categories for each and every project using WPBM; it's difficult if not impossible to do it piecemeal. It would be a huge operation. Happy‑melon 09:35, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Classes can only be automatically assigned if a page has been tagged in the first place, and I think that's the reason for low usage. Regarding Portal-Class, surely it stands to reason that not every project will have an associated portal? What about Disambig-Class? I've not checked, but is there a significantly higher level of usage compared with Redirect-Class? PC78 (talk) 09:50, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Disambig-Class has 648 subcats, of which again over half are empty. There are 80 categories with ten or more members, and numbers are more evenly shared amongst the populated categories than with Redirect-Class. Just food for thought. Happy‑melon 14:30, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Just wondering if that data is accurate, it says Category:Disambig-Class Baseball articles has 0 when infact it has 5. (I know still not a high usage, but could be an issue with the rest of the categories]].). Same thing with Category:Disambig-Class Indian music articles, shows 0 on your list but really has 1. Borgarde (talk) 11:35, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Can you find out how many talk page transclusions each of the non-standard class templates have? That might give some indication as to their level of usage. PC78 (talk) 16:50, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

I can get that data from the toolserver, but it'll be impossible to filter out the uses in banners from uses on /Assessment project pages, etc. I'll get all transclusions to be consistent. Happy‑melon 17:01, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

{{Disambig-Class}} - 15,125 distinct pages.

{{Template-Class}} - 25,352 pages

{{Category-Class}} - 95,367

{{Project-Class}} - 1,516

{{Portal-Class}} - 3,336

Any more people want? Happy‑melon 20:14, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Image/File-Class? PC78 (talk) 11:59, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

{{Image-Class}} - 19,612

{{File-Class}} - 19,854 − 19,612 = 242

I think it's obvious which are the new kids on the block :D Happy‑melon 17:37, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, I was expecting Image-Clas to be much lower than that. PC78 (talk) 17:46, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I'm going to start doing this. It's a complicated operation, and one that's reasonably easy to revert if consensus swings against it. But it looks like there is general support for removing at least Redirect-Class. Any further comments still welcome, naturally. Happy‑melon 12:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

So, which ones are going? Are Template and Category going to stay, because they fit into the group of classes that can be automatically assigned from the namespace. DeFaultRyan 18:56, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Right now I'm only doing Redirect-Class. Template and Category are by far the most used of the non-article classes; they'll be the last to go anywhere. It's certainly something we need to look at more closely though. Happy‑melon 19:54, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

I am skeptical towards the changes made today by Happy-melon with respect to Redirect-class pages (see also this discussion). I do agree with the perception that this class is being put to use by very few projects, but then again, a lot of projects aren't very concerned with assessments at all. I basically don't see the need for any intervention at this time. I think this particular class should be simply left alone for now. However, I wouldn't mind the transition from the extended quality scale to an opt-in scheme where this class would have to be added separately. Because we should expect a reasonably long acclimatization period for this class, I suggest we revert Happy-melon's changes made today and re-evaluate the situation in one year at the earliest, unless events make an earlier discussion appropriate. If we make a policy decision on this now, I fear that will be a premature one and we stunt this structure's natural development potential. __meco (talk) 22:15, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think you fully understand what has been done here. You say you support a "transition to an opt-in system": this is exactly what is being undertaken. Today I have gone through and 'opted in' around fourty projects that clearly make use of the Redirect-Class assessment; this is in addition to those projects who had previously implemented custom masks. This morning there were 3,600 pages in Category:WPBannerMeta templates using obscure class values; I manually redirected or reassessed less than 220 of them; the remaining 3,380 remain as Redirect-Class. The only cases where I altered the talk pages were where it was abundantly clear from the population of the relevant "Redirect-Class Foo articles" category (often just a single article) that it was a pure accident, a result of a passing editor reasessing all the banners on a page with no thought for whether the class was actually being used. There are over ten thousand articles tagged as Redirect-Class: if you thought that this is a move against the classification itself, you are simply mistaken. This is purely a process to transform Redirect-Class into the opt-in assessment that you suggest, and also to clear up a mess that, by forcing all projects to adopt the assessment whether they wanted to or not, the banner has perpetuated. Happy‑melon 23:13, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Does Template:WPBannerMeta/class need changing now to remove the Redirect code? -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:41, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

I left it overnight to see if any new pages dropped out of the woodwork, but yes, removing the class is now just as easy as removing the line from /class, which I've now done. Mission accomplished. Happy‑melon 16:23, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Right, now that that part is done, what about all the empty categories? Should they just be CSD or does it need a CFD? -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:27, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

They'll become elegible for WP:CSD#C1 in four days, or they're arguably elegible for G8 now as being "populated by a deleted or retargeted template". There's no rush, but equally no need for a CfD. We can keep checking that list to see if any projects start using the category again, and in a few days go through and delete the ones that are still empty. Happy‑melon 16:44, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

I'd urge caution in using WP:CSD for these. There are those who would delete them again after a project later recreates them if they were previously deleted with a CSD log entry. I'm also concerned some editors may take this as a valid reason to begin flagging all empty project assessment/rating categories for speedy deletion. Tothwolf (talk) 21:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Neither CSD criterion is appropriate for 'active' assessment categories: C1 includes an explicit exclusion for "project categories that by their nature may become empty on occasion", G8 explicitly names only "categories populated by deleted or retargetted templates". If a category can be filled by a template, then it cannot be CSD'd. G4 (recreation of deleted material) does not apply to speedy deletions. Anyone who acts as you claim would be acting in violation of the deletion policy and should be treated accordingly. Happy‑melon 11:13, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I would hold one a while before starting deletion of these categories, until the projects that were using them have had a chance to respond to the change. (TimothyRias (talk) 11:41, 7 April 2009 (UTC))

Well if I did my job properly on Saturday the projects that were using them should still be using them. The projects that weren't but had a few articles accidentally drop into them are the ones we're looking at :D. That said, I agree with you that there is no rush. Although if a project doesn't even notice that the category has been deprecated, then that doesn't really encourage me to think they were using it in the first place... Happy‑melon 11:54, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, WP Physics was (sort of) using these cats. "Sort of" meaning that we had a somewhat populated "Redirect-Class physics articles" category, that nobody had really got around to looking at. I only noticed today, that the numbers in some of our article overview where off. (we suddenly had a lot more redirects with NA importance then our total number of redirects.) In the mean time, I have start a discussion on the project page if we really need these cats, which can take a while since the projects policy page doesn't really get that much traffic. (TimothyRias (talk) 14:15, 7 April 2009 (UTC))

I've still seen it done. I uncovered a number of articles in the WP:WPIRC scope that had been speedy deleted again (originally A1, A7, A9, etc) after they were recreated years later by a different editor. Some of them I intend to have restored but I just lack the time to deal with everything by myself. Tothwolf (talk) 01:48, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I have now deleted all the Redirect-Class categories that were still empty, some 234 in all. Happy‑melon 20:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Default behaviour for Redirect-class now

Now that support for redirect-class has been removed by default, I would suggest that a rating of Redirect-Class results in an NA classification. Any such instance would not be on an article and so it would not seem to make sense for it to go into the Unassessed category. This may seem like an anomaly, but it is exactly the way that we currently treat Template-Class and Portal-Class with banners that are not using the full quality scale. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:13, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Obviously, I disagree, although I'm open to persuasion. Having decided to 'unsupport' Redirect-Class, we should do the job properly, not continue to 'half support' it by auto-assigning it NA-Class. That would give the impression to editors who do 'hit-and-run' assessments that that is what the WikiProject in question wants done with their redirects, when in fact it's quite likely that the project doesn't want to deal with redirects at all. I think that handling Redirect-Class should be left entirely up to the individual projects, through the use of custom masks. Happy‑melon 11:22, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I think it should be quite obvious that a project is not using Redirect-Class when the banner comes up with NA-Class instead. But I don't think you can try to stop people tagging redirect talk pages - a determined editor could always use the NA-Class to tag it anyway. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:43, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

That's true, but what I meant is that it gives the impression that "WikiProject X wants any redirects under its scope to be classified as NA-Class", when that might not be the situation at all. Naturally if an editor is determined to assess the redirect as something, we can't stop them marking it as NA, but at least we're not giving the impression that that's what the project wants when that might not be the case. Happy‑melon 11:56, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

But at the moment, they are going into Unassessed which may not be what the project wants either ... we should choose the more common-sense approach. And why do we classify templates as NA-Class if a project has chosen not to use the FQS? By your logic, they should be unassessed as well. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:41, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I do take your point, another situation in which FQS is somewhat confused. Although Template-Class, Category-Class, etc, are different in being able to be assigned automatically by namespace. I think PC78 is right in that we need to completely reevaluate the way we do QS and FQS. Happy‑melon 13:13, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Well let's see what others think. For me, the current behaviour is completely illogical. It's not the same situation for Future- and Current- class because they are likely to be articles and so "Unassessed" seems appropriate for them. But it would be the same if ever Project- or Disambig- class were ever scrapped. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:37, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Can I have some input from others on this please? I'm still not happy with the current situation. For example, today I converted Template:WikiProject Hinduism. I noticed there were a few redirects which had been tagged (for example Talk:Panchamukha Hanuman), but not enough to warrant a custom class mask in my opinion. However I would be much happier if those were classed as NA rather than Unassessed where it will waste the time of an editor assessing for the project in the future. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:24, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Both sides make compelling arguments. It seems that if redirect-class is completely unsupported, resulting in "unassessed", we'll end up with a bunch of time needed for editors to go over all these newly unassesssed articles, and have to figure out what to do with them. Of those, some will just remove the banner entirely, but some will want to keep the banner on, in order to keep them in the categories, in which case they'll have to go and manually tag them as NA-class anyway. The software engineer in me wants to provide some sort of parameter or hook to allow projects to choose which approach to take, but we still have to decide on a sensible default... Sigh. Personally, I'm slightly leaning towards having redirect go into NA rather than Unassessed, but I'm open to changing my mind if I see a compelling reason I wasn't aware of. DeFaultRyan 15:09, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

"some sort of parameter or hook to allow projects to choose which approach to take"... <cough>custom mask</cough>... :D Happy‑melon 15:18, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Correct - the method exists for projects to control entirely what they want to happen. This question is about how we deal with projects that have not chosen. As H-M said, we do not particularly want to impose something on a project which they might not want, but unless we ask them individually (probably desirable for active WikiProjects, but unnecessarily inefficient for less active ones) we have to make an educated guess. The one that makes sense to me is to treat them differently from Cheesecake-Class: use the information we have (i.e. it's not an article) and use the most suitable class that the project is using (NA-Class). — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:57, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Before MiszaBot gets this I'd like to say that I'm still looking for comments to settle this one way or the other. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:51, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:13, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:24, 19 May 2009 (UTC)