Module talk:WikiProject banner/Archive 10

Assessment of redirects, categories, and templates
Hi. You might be able to give helpful input in this Village pump (misc) thread, concerning assessment banners on the talkpages of redirects, categories, and templates (Particularly the redirects). I'm curious about big-picture perspectives, and also coal-face problems. Also wanting to get those errors mentioned, looked at, by someone who knows these things. Much thanks. –Quiddity (talk) 23:18, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Module:WikiProjectBanner
Hello all. I've started writing a preliminary Lua module, Module:WikiProjectBanner, to supersede WPBannerMeta. It is still in the early stages, and I am still deciding exactly what features it should have. From the discussion above, and from my own ideas, I have come up with the following list: I am sure that there must be other features that people would like, though. Is there anything that you have wanted to do with your WikiProject template that hasn't been possible with WPBannerMeta? Let me know and I will try and include it. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 11:50, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Unlimited task forces and notes - no more fiddly hook code.
 * Implement all existing hooks in Lua. (Perhaps as sub-modules for complex hooks.)
 * Detect invalid parameters without having to pass them through to the WikiProject template. (This is now technically possible, as Lua modules can see arguments passed to the parent of the invoking template as well as arguments from the invoking template itself.)
 * Fully customisable class masks and importance masks that you can set directly in the module invocation. (No more need for a separate class mask invocation for each project.)
 * Automatic documentation.
 * Automatically generate TemplateData output on template documentation pages (see mw:Extension:TemplateData).
 * Make parameter alias names available to the module. Previously, aliases were specified in the individual WikiProject templates (e.g. ), and there was no way for WPBannerMeta to know whether or not an alias was being used. Explicitly defining aliases will enable good automatic documentation and TemplateData output.
 * I think it would be good to also potentially do the following things:
 * Allow project to display their task forces horizontally like is done in Template:US Roads WikiProject. Kumioko (talk) 13:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * This is going to take a bit to explain but be able to allow a project to be marked as primary within a template and what order with most important on top. Template:WikiProject United States has a lot of projects it supports. But it would be nice if we could set which was the primary for the article. For example, for Arizona, we should set Arizona as the primary and let WikiProject United States display as the smaller associated project.
 * Potentially it would also be nice to display more than once on an article. For example there are occassions where more than one project may apply and there may be more than one "primary". Using the Barack Obama article I would argue that there are a couple of associated projects within the WPUS template that should display separately. That way one template could be used to display more than one project and use the core logic of that template once to drive the parameters and categorization that is shared by the multiple projects. Particularly when the projects have limited activity there is less of a need for them to have their own template and logic IMO. Kumioko (talk) 13:20, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * These are food for thought, although number one should be simple enough. I'm not sure I'm understanding two and three properly, though. For number two, would this mean essentially specifying an order to display task forces on any given talk page? And for your number three, could you give the names of the projects that you think should be separate on the Obama article? I think it would help me to see a concrete example. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Number 2 is basically just setting which project is set as the primary. So if you had multiple projects in a template we could set which one is the main one. So instead of the WPUS icon and info taking center stage and Arizona being smaller and embedded they would switch and Arizona would be the main one and United States would be the smaller one. I hope that explains it but I can create something to explain it graphically if that would be easier. For number 3, I think a good example would be the U.S. Presidents one. So instead of it being embedded with the others it would appear as a separate project within the wrapper like Kansas and U.S. Congress but still be coded in the WPUS template. That's just an example and I can give somem better ones if you want. Kumioko (talk) 14:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * No, I got it that time, thanks for the explanation. :) — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:51, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I've just thought of another question. In the case of the WPUS banner, at the moment the task forces are displayed in exactly the same way as the WikiProjects, because of the limitations in WPBannerMeta. But with this new module, we could remove this limitation. So if you could format the WikiProjects and the task forces differently, how would you do it? — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 09:06, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Well that's a good question. I'm not sure I know of a better way to display it. As I mentioned above I think it would be good to set the primary but other than that, I'm not sure. Kumioko (talk) 20:03, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Wow! This looks awesome.  Lua can do all of those things?  Maybe once you are done with this we can talk about a module to overhaul the article creation wizard or the teahouse host/guest signup process?  Technical 13 (talk) 13:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep, that's all possible. You should learn some Lua too, I'm sure you would enjoy it. :) — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * It's on my loooooong todo list... I just bumped it up some and have been asking around trying to put together a "team" of sorts to try and put a framework together for some modules for this project. Would you be interested in just shadowing the project? Technical 13 (talk) 16:56, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * As for Kumioko's item 1, Template:Canada Roads WikiProject already does the horizontal taskforces. US Roads has other issues that would need sorting as well. Mainly their custom sort option. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:15, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what is meant by "display their task forces horizontally". Please give examples of talk pages where the WikiProject banner does this. -- Red rose64 (talk) 15:21, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * See Talk:Yellowhead Highway, the Topics section in the banner. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:57, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see what it does - it feeds Canada Roads WikiProject/taskforce into and wraps that in some HTML to make a two-cell table row before passing that into HOOK_TF. -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:01, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * That would be basically it as far as I am concerned. mw:Extension:TemplateData looks interesting. I would welcome an easy way to discover available parameters of a template, though I am not sure whether TemplateData would leave room for everything that would be relevant for Rater. Keφr 13:39, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * What other data would you be interested in having available? Perhaps we could file a feature request for TemplateData if the data would be relevant for multiple tools. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:01, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I am afraid some of it would not. Basically, grouping and type annotations — whether a parameter denotes a request, B-class checklist item, task force membership, more detailed information on allowed values than just "string", whether a parameter should be paired with another (like task force membership and importance, request notes). So either TemplateData should make these annotations available through its API or the template code itself should be simple enough to be directly parsed. Keφr 14:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Those are good points. I think the first thing we should do is check with the TemplateData people to see if including this kind of information might be possible. I'd also be interested to hear what kind of form the API might take. If using TemplateData turns out not to be doable, there are a number of other ways we could do it, though. We could roll our JSON on the template page, or get the template to output JSON when called with a certain parameter, or do everything with invisible html tags, etc. Using TemplateData sounds the most sane of all of these ways, though, so I'd prefer to go with that if it's feasible. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Skimming through source code, I see TemplateData does not offer arbitrary parameter annotations yet. I would prefer something light on the servers and cacheable, so if TemplateData turns out to be an unfeasible solution, that leaves me with parsing template markup directly. If the module is done well, that should be simple enough. Keφr 15:12, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * At the moment I find it easy to discover available parameters of a template; I just open up the template source and search for triple opening braces. From my experiences of those templates that have so far been converted to Lua, such as, it is now much more difficult. This is because there is no single page which gives the parameter names in a consistent manner. Sometimes they're processed in the module itself; but sometimes it's a sub-module; and sometimes the sub-module, having detected a particular parameter name, then renames the parameter which is then picked up by the first module. Trying to trace whether a parameter is valid or not, and how it's processed is a nightmare. -- Red rose64 (talk) 15:49, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Finding three braces is easy. Discovering what they mean, programmatically, is harder. This is drifting a bit off-topic. What I am talking about here is discovering what parameters a template recognises and presenting that to a user in a specialised tool. (Ever tried Rater? The current version is prototype-quality, really, and this data problem is one of the reasons.) Direct human users should be satisfied with the auto-generated documentation. Though I will note that I find no difference between chasing sub-templates like in WPBannerMeta and subroutines in modules, and that Module:Citation/CS1 is rather easy to follow in my opinion. Keφr 16:16, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I've seen repeated requests for date stamps on the assessments, so that people know how long it's been since the class was adjusted. I'm not sure that this is a good thing (it's a stub in 2007, it's a stub in 2008, it's a stub in 2009, it's a stub in 2010, it's still a stub in 2011...), but it's a common request. Less commonly, people ask for the name of the person who did the assessment.

You might want to advertise this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I do not think this is something that Lua can help with. An alternative quality assessment system has been devised to address this (and some other problems with the current assessment system), but it has not been adopted yet. And it still requires manually filling out the appropriate parameters, though a userscript could remove that burden. (In a few weeks I should have some free time to add this functionality to the next version of Rater. At last.) Keφr 20:12, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * If your talking about that horrible and complicted multipart grading nightmare that was done by WikiProject United States Public Policy for a while I hope it never gets implemented. We have a hard enough time trying to get articles assessed now with simple means. That would ensure they never get graded unless a bot does it. Kumioko (talk) 20:14, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Probably mine talking about that, yes. This might be a bit off-topic, but… what is so horrible about it? It makes sense for me. Please explain. Keφr 20:18, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
 * First, too much time is spent on assessments now IMO, this will make people spend even more time and will drive a lot of folks away. Second, most projects don't use the B-Class checklist for that reason, it takes too much time and third and more importantly, any assessment below GA is frankly fine as just a subjective guess. If its wrong, its just not that big of a deal. Stub, start, C, it really doesn't make a difference. Even B isn't that big of a deal. Its only when we get to GA, A (for those that use it) and FA/FL. So implementing something that requires a high degree of time and effort just isn't worth it. Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Recommend adding Module Namespace to class list
As more and more templates are converted into Modules I think the need will arise rather soon that some projects will want to tag a module as they do for Templates. Adding this to the class list isn't all that hard but before I do that I wanted to start a discussion to see if anyone has any comments or problems with doing so. Kumioko (talk) 13:08, 24 June 2013 (UTC)


 * They could just be bundled in with the templates. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:21, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * That's true too. Good point. Kumioko (talk) 13:28, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

New editor needs help
There is a request for help with a malfunctioning WikiProject banner at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council from a relatively new editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:38, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've got the template working for them. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 23:24, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

B-class articles are shown as C-class
I have added the B-class checklist hook to WikiProject U2 and it shows (Rated C-class) for articles that have been assessed as B-class. So, I had to add the 6 parameters to all B-Class U2 articles to make them run correctly. I've also noticed that WikiProject Songs, WikiProject Comics and WikiProject Apple Inc. — and probably many others — have the same problem. Thanks in advance & happy editing! –p joe f (talk • contribs) 12:50, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * By design they are only shown as B when all checks are completed. Agathoclea (talk) 13:13, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Module:Pagetype
I've created Module:Pagetype, a replacement for pagetype, and I am thinking of updating the template to the Lua version later on this week. The Lua version has some differences from the current template, so I would like to get others' comments before making the switch. Please let me know your thoughts over at Template talk:Pagetype. — Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 14:17, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Draftspace detection and auto-classification
The video games WikiProject has expressed an interest in categorizing drafts-class articles. Instead of implementing draftspace detection and auto-classification on our individual banner, it would seem to make more sense to do it here on the meta template so all projects can use it. (Similar to how redirects are currently configured to auto-classify.) Thoughts? czar ♔  16:17, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I did also already post at Template_talk:Class_mask, which seems to handle the underlying class selection logic. —  HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 17:05, 27 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I've made the changes so that the WPBannerMeta now supports it (if the projects uses a class mask) but there is still a couple of issues that need discussing, namely, the colour and the icon to use for Draft. -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:46, 27 December 2013 (UTC)


 * What about a red X for an icon? (meaning not-live) and pink or red as the color? It'd be eyecatching. -- 65.94.76.3 (talk) 06:04, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * This is only one of about a dozen templates that need to be updated for this that I know of. There are several that's haven't been touched yet. Template:Documentation for example might need to be updated. There are also at least half a dozen media wiki pages (and probably more). Kumioko (talk) 13:07, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Red X is already in use for Unknown-Class: → . You can see most of the icons (except that for User) in the list at the top of the documentation of Template:Class/icon (the table towards the bottom is incomplete). Pinks are not a good idea because these are used for the importance scale. You can see most of the current colours (except those for AL, BL, CL, No, Draft) in the strip at the top of . -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:40, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * There are two unknowns listed, one of them is a question mark, which makes logical sense, since it's an unknown... I don't see how unknown makes sense with an X. Since it uses "no", then this would be none-class?
 * I suppose modifying the stub-class icon, with a less filled in pie? (1/3 pie?) And Brown? (representing brown wrapping paper, of an article yet to be unwrapped)
 * -- 65.94.76.3 (talk) 15:13, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * How about Text-x-generic_with_pencil.svg and light pink? I don't see pink used in the articles-by-quality spectrum above. (Not-so-good alternatives: Pencil.svg Pencil_icon.png) czar  ♔  15:23, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I like the paper/pencil icon. Not sure X fits. I'm not sure the red/pink color match the draft purpose, but it's true pink isn't used by anything else. We could just use some shade of gray (kind of like "needed" class) -- not yet a real color. —  HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:30, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It depends upon what you mean by "pink". The importance scale uses saturated tints of magenta, some of which are decidedly pink; see . -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:57, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Good catch. I think "light pink" would conflict with the "importance" palette. Some other ideas: light coral/salmon, sandy brown, wheat, golden rod, medium aqua marine [sic] from this chart. czar ♔  20:25, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I also think the paper/pencil icon fits this nicely and would be in favour of wheat or medium aqua marine from the above list. Samwalton9 (talk) 21:24, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Some examples mentioning the colours from above: -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:47, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

#cccccc wheat aquamarine pink brown toadd toadd <td style="text-align:center;">toadd <td style="text-align:center;">toadd <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:#cccccc;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:wheat;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:aquamarine;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:pink;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:brown;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:white;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:white;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:white;"> Draft <td class="assess assess-draft" style="text-align:center;white-space:nowrap;font-weight:bold;background:white;"> Draft
 * }
 * Any updates or thoughts on this? Samwalton9 (talk) 00:28, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

and parameters
It might be nice if you would support the  and   parameters from namespace detect; that would make it much simpler to see what happens when a banner template is used in various namespaces. &mdash;SamB (talk) 21:04, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

please see Template:WikiProject New York Theatre
Please see Template:WikiProject New York Theatre It´s putting talk pages on thr worng place and I thing I haven't resolved the issue. Thanks, NelsonCM (talk) 15:10, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I've fixed it, and I've also written some basic documentation for the template. If you are still seeing Category:Theatre templates on talk pages, it is because the category updates are queued in the job queue and haven't yet been carried out. If you don't feel like waiting for the job queue, you can make a null edit to the affected talk pages. Best — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 16:47, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I amplified the doc entries for the three parameters. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:57, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * wouldn't have worked, because it appends the category to 60px which is intended for an image size specification. doesn't expect categories to be placed "inside", except on the (very few) parameters that are intended for text - such as MAIN_TEXT. The version that you amended it from was basically OK, except that the   and  shouldn't have been on separate lines, but butted up together, as in   -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:45, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank for your explanaitions. I must say that the banner confused me and it never came to my mind the "documentation" (Normaly it's that the Template that I'm used to see and I got lost!!!). Since I was short in time I thought it was better to ask for help. I'll wait for the job queue. Thank you. Keep up the good work. NelsonCM (talk) 22:40, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank for your words. That edit was a "Hail Mary". I knew I'd made a "My bad" so, also because I was short in time, I thought it was better to ask for help. Thank you. Keep up the good work. NelsonCM (talk) 22:40, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Need help at Template:WikiProject United States Public Policy/class
There is a little different code at Template:WikiProject United States Public Policy/class than is normally used for the custom class mask. I'm trying to get the template to sort Categories, Redirects, etc., into their correct categories. Here is an example of the problem at Category talk:Foreign relations of the United States. The WPUSA template shows "Category", but the USPP template shows "NA", and it seems to overide the USA template. Would someone be able to help with the code? Thank you. Funandtrvl (talk) 23:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
 * That code was never designed to use the full quality scale. Those categories were created in 2013 and the code was never updated. It might be worth asking the project (or ) what they want. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:01, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Why does not use the standard  technique? See for example [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:WPBannerMeta_templates_using_custom_classes&pagefrom=S24%0AWikiProject+24#mw-pages any of these]. Look for the box beginning "This WikiProject banner uses, a meta-template for easily creating and maintaining banners and talk-page notices."; in that there should be a bullet "A custom class mask is in use." Click the link in that bullet. -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:36, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I realize that the USPP template was not designed to have the full quality scale. However, US Public Policy articles can also be tagged using the WPUSA template, and that template has the full quality scale. When an article or category, etc. is tagged with both the WPUSA and the USPP templates, a category page is not put into the Category-Class category, it is going into the NA-Class category. I was just trying to clean up the difference between the actions of the two templates. Funandtrvl (talk) 17:59, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Question
Is there the option in this template to provide assessment for groups not visible in the template, such as the Dogs banner providing Mammals assessment, as per WT:COUNCIL? John Carter (talk) 20:42, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, use Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/qualitycats. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:55, 27 June 2014 (UTC)


 * As someone on the short bus about markup and syntax, how could this be applied to WikiProject Equine? Or, for that matter, dogs, cats, and the other animal projects?   If I were to do this at the equine page, I honestly don't know how to implement this... and, WikIProject Equine already has a cleanup listing for the project itself, we wouldn't want to lost that?   Montanabw <sup style="color:purple;">(talk)  22:45, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
 * [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WikiProject_Equine/sandbox&diff=614743739&oldid=614743699 Here it is in the equine sandbox] -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:47, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
 * OK, so if you implement that in the real template, do we who care still get the WPEQ-specific listings like this, this and related listings?  Montanabw <sup style="color:purple;">(talk)  02:05, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, all the equine stuff will still be the same, all you get is some extra mammal categories added to the talk page. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:01, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * will this above solution address your concerns about articles appearing on the WP Mammals cleanup list?  Montanabw <sup style="color:purple;">(talk)  07:54, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * The main problem including the mammals categories within the equine banner is that pages such as Talk:Zara Phillips andd Talk:Cart would then be included in mammals, so you are going to be adding a lot of people and objects. Just wondering if that's what you want to happen? -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:05, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, it's that or Plantdrew will need to add about 1000 WP Mammals tags to the equine articles... and the cat/dog/etc ones... which I don't think necessary, but I'm trying to see if there is a middle ground. ;-)   Montanabw <sup style="color:purple;">(talk)  08:25, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * There are two possibilities: (i) add the code to the Equine box as suggested above, but also add a parameter so that the extra categorisation only happens if you set that param, e.g. yes (ii) leave the Equine banner alone, put code into the Mammals banner instead, but again, it would need a parameter like yes -- Red rose64 (talk) 08:37, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I like the "mammals=yes" idea for the equine box the best. That would, I think, address  's concerns without cluttering up the talk page with a bunch of wikiproject boxes. Would it be an invisible parameter or would it make more sense to add a very small "this article is also monitored by WikiProject mammals" or something? Should we also take this to the cat, dog and other projects that Plantdrew has concerns about? (Seems like an elegant fix to me)  Montanabw <sup style="color:purple;">(talk)  17:10, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Unable to translate the term importance into Tamil
I have been trying to bring this importance scale concept into Tamil Wikipedia. I translated WPBannerMeta and also /importance scale, but the is still hurdle. Even if I introduce the Tamil word for importance, it is still showing up "importance" in the translated template and not the Tamil equivalent of "importance". Please guide me in how to deal with IMPN - Vatsan34 (talk) 06:40, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Task force portals causing trouble
WPVG's template gets really wonky in the formatting when a task force that includes a portal is called. Anyone know why this is happening? czar ♔  02:37, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Please give an example of a page where the display is not as it should be. -- Red rose64 (talk) 09:48, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * , on the WPVG page example, you can see that the task force listings with portals add extra vertical whitespace and have bigger icons instead of being uniform with the rest. czar ♔  13:24, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, it's nothing to do with the WPBanner template group, but, which seems to force an 0.5 em (approximately 6px) margin top and bottom of each portal box. I trace it any deeper into : it's been converted to Lua. -- Red rose64 (talk) 17:47, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * , there is a margin0em option on Portal, but it appears that WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces doesn't support it. I would think it should be implemented by default, no? What's the normal route for testing that since the testcases would vary so widely by WikiProject? czar ♔  18:23, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Sandbox version looks better—thanks. I also started a conversation at Template talk:Portal about reducing the vertical height of the portals, but let me know if you have any ideas about that and getting the line heights back to normal czar ♔  19:29, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * As you noticed, I set up Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce/sandbox to bring in as compared with the live template. Notice that I used 0 0 0 1em. According to my browser's "inspect element" feature, the default styling is   - it's a space separated list (in the order top, right, bottom, left) of the individual margin values. If I had used plain 0em (or even 0) it would have altered all four margins - no effect on the right, which is zero anyway, but it would have reduced the left margin too.
 * To get that to be brought in by Template:WikiProject Video games/sandbox required . We have two routes going forward: (i) if the margin change is desirable for all WikiProject banners, we copy Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce/sandbox to Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce; (ii) if the change is to be made in WikiProject Video games only, we move Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce/sandbox to a subpage of Template:WikiProject Video games - say Template:WikiProject Video games/taskforce - and in Template:WikiProject Video games we add WikiProject Video games/taskforce once each to the three instances of . -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:54, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'm in favor of (i), but we'll see what others think. Any ideas on the vertical height of portal in conjunction with this change? czar ♔  20:12, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * At, the heights of the four taskforce portals are governed by three things: the height of the image; the amount of text; and the CSS styling applied. Nintendo and Sega portals are the shallowest, at 20px - this includes 1px each for the top and bottom borders (the images File:Nintendo.svg and File:SEGA logo.svg are only 8px and 11px high respectively, which is less than the capital N and S in the text, so they have no effect); in Sony PlayStation portal, the text wraps to two lines giving a height of 30px (again the image File:PS3-slim-console.png, which is 16px high, doesn't affect it); and in Xbox portal, the image File:Xbox logo 2012 cropped.png is 28px high (25px wide) so the box as a whole is 36px high. -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:22, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Right, but is there a way to set a limit on those sizes? Also how are you seeing two lines? Unless the window is small, the text fits on one line without wrapping in my browsers. czar ♔  21:26, 24 May 2014 (UTC)


 * The portal box is styled  of which 34px is the width of the cell containing the image; there seems to be a 6px loss somewhere, leaving the text cell at 135px wide; that has 2px padding all round, so there is 131px available. The words "Sony Playstation" are 94px wide; the word "portal" is 35px wide. I think that it's a characteristic of my browser/font combination (Firefox 29 and Arial) that gives those widths; if the three words of text had totalled just 2px less, they would have fitted onto one line, as demonstrated in the second of the two portal boxes above where the omission of the "i" allows the three words to go on one line. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:24, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * My question is how to limit the image size, not the portal box size. The latter seems to follow the former. For example, at WPVG, the Nintendo and Sega images are 11px high, and when I manually set the Xbox or PlayStation images to 11px high, the box resizes. Do you know why Portal is resizing the images to be larger than 11px high and whether it's something that can be changed specifically for this WPVG banner's use if not specified as a param for portals in the future? czar ♔  00:22, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The CSS code can be found in the p._portal function of Module:Portal, which shouldn't be too hard to understand. Some code pertinent to the height:
 * The default margin on the outer div tag is "0.5em 0 0.5em 1em" ("0.5em 1em 0.5em 0" if yes). This can be overridden with margin, as noted above.
 * In the table tag, font-size is set to 85%.
 * In the table tag, line-height is set to 110%.
 * In the table tag, max-width is set to 175px, so anything wider than this will take up more than one line.
 * The image size is set to "32x28px".
 * Padding on the second td tag (the one containing the portal text) is set to "0 0.2em".
 * The only one of these that can be overridden at the moment is the margin. However, I'm open to adding in overrides for the others as well. Any new overrides should probably be suggested on Template talk:Portal so that other editors have a chance to comment. Alternatively, we could create a new portal template for use in WikiProject banners that does what we want height-wise. Something simple like Template:Portal-inline plus a few modifications might do the job well. — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 02:20, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

, I don't see this setup having much of a use outside this localized need, but would you suggest? It might be easier to do it locally for the purposes of this template, but if you think others might use it, I could set up a request at tt:portal. Thoughts? czar ♔  03:15, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
 * , the override proposal has received no objection at Template_talk:Portal. Ready to move ahead? czar ♔   16:39, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Edit request to limit portal margins within taskforce subtemplate
We discussed this above and there has been no objection. For the sake of aligning the taskforce portals within the banners uniformly, please merge Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce/sandbox to Template:WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces/taskforce (diff, or  →  )

Also since the subtemplate is protected, it could use a  czar  ♔  17:23, 29 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:31, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Edit request to /core to remove navbar call
Please remove the following text from Template:WPBannerMeta/core:

This navbar template call was [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WPBannerMeta/core&diff=259375408&oldid=258793115 added] back in 2008, but then [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WPBannerMeta/core&diff=next&oldid=259387592 immediately hidden] by CSS (display:none). Right now it serves no purpose (since it is invisible), yet the navbar template is still getting transcluded in every WikiProject banner on every talk page using one. FYI, you can even "View source" on this very talk page to see it, search the source for "navbar mini" and you'll see the div containing the v-t-e links, which are invisible in the WikiProject_Council banner above. --Netoholic @ 22:48, 16 July 2014 (UTC) On the other side of this, this hidden code this inserts an appreciable amount to the HTML output of 5.5 million talk pages, and on every talk page that uses multiple WikiProject banners, then this bit of hidden code is repeated for every banner (ex. view source of (Talk:Arc de Triomphe). This reaches the scale of being a noticeable increase in bandwidth requirements when you multiple it by 5.5 million over the course of these last 6 years that the code has been hidden away in this template. I am sorry, but I think this inconvenience (to Wikimedia) vastly outweighs the minor convenience of an unknown and unconfirmed number of template-editor/admins that could ever use this function. -- Netoholic @ 02:49, 17 July 2014 (UTC) I don't think it really is, but, if this function really is found to be so valuable, it could be incorporated directly into the Template:WPBannerMeta/core by converting the template call to a simple   string. All you would need is the edit link, even, and it could be dressed up anyway that works, still be hidden, but reduce the HTML footprint significantly and eliminate the need to transclude and process a template on 5.5 million pages. I see some other simple templates like (Pagetype, Transclude) in the /core that could similarly have their functions incorporated or call a related module directly. -- Netoholic @ 11:16, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I've implemented this in Template:WPBannerMeta/core/sandbox, and I can't see any problems with the edit. I'll leave this open a little longer in case anyone spots any issues, and if there are no problems I'll make the edit. — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 23:19, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: It can be made visible by a little bit of CSS:  and since we don't know who is doing that, removing the navbar will inconvenience those people who have that CSS. -- Red rose64 (talk) 23:55, 16 July 2014 (UTC)
 * - What makes you think that anyone is even aware or using such an esoteric hack like that? There's no documentation around that, and the code just seems misplaced and forgotten about, not something in active use. Almost all WikiProject banner templates are at least semi-protected, and the widely used ones are at least template protected. The banners are not frequently updated so do not need navbar links anyway, but even when they are edited, it would require a technically knowledgeable template editor or administrator. These people already know how to get to the template to edit it without the use of some CSS-hidden links.
 * Well, the code was added by, so have you asked them why it was done? Or why it was apparently not documented at the time? In User:Happy-melon/vector.css we find:  so not only is Happy-melon "using such an esoteric hack like that", I would also guess that Happy-melon, at the very least, finds it useful. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:56, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Is it reasonable to have this particular thing being spammed to 5.5 million talk pages, multiple times per page, for the sake of a minor convenience that an experienced template editor might use sometimes? In his last 500 template edits spanning back to 2009, I counted around 25-30 different WikiProject banners he edited.  Even if we assume he uses his hidden code here every time to save a few seconds to open a link to each banner template, that is only about 5-6 templates per year.
 * See User:MSGJ/monobook.css :) Why would it be better to substitute the navbar code directly into /core? That makes little sense to me ... &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:27, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * There's User:InverseHypercube/vector.css as well that I could find, there may well be more. On what valid basis are you concerned about the performance of these transclusions?  <b style="color:forestgreen">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange">melon</b> 12:52, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I knew it wouldn't be long before someone brought up WP:PERF. That document is largely targeted to people concerned about simple things, like how long a talk page should get before archived, or such. If you read past the title, you find a section devoted just to us template editors - Editors still have a role to play. Go read the whole thing, then come back. (waits) Now, as you've read, we template editors do have a special role to play in identifying issues and weighing the pros and cons. In this case, there are a couple objective issues I've seen so far:
 * When I did some customized searches (limit 500, various namespaces) using Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Navbar, it was pooping the server and timing out.
 * This template adds an objectively measurable amount of CSS-hidden HTML to the output of every Banner-ed talk page. On this page, that is 680 characters. Doesn't seem like much, but when you consider 5.5 million talk pages, some of which have multiple Banners on them each adding around this much HTML.
 * Now, does this stuff break the servers? Individually, day-to-day, probably not, but that still doesn't mean we ignore our ability to weigh the benefits to 3-4 identified people that use this function rarely against this objectively measurable (and avoidable) increase in output. It is our job as template editors to be on the lookout for inefficiency and replace it with better solutions, because we actually do have the ability to impact performance. -- Netoholic @ 19:17, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you realise that the editor you have told to go away and read Don't worry about performance was the person who basically wrote that page? Perhaps you could try not to be so condescending. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:29, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * If I seems condescending, its only because I've discovered this practically useless, CSS-hidden HTML that is a waste of space and bandwidth. on several million pages. I'm reopening the edit request in the hopes that someone will disable this toy code. -- Netoholic @ 22:04, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Sorry, but based on the above discussion I can't see that there's a consensus to make the edit now. Perhaps you might be able to find a consensus by opening this to wider discussion, but that consensus needs to be found before using the edit template-protected template. — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 22:09, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Does "needing attention" get any?
Does anyone actually find the attention flag useful? In the projects I am familiar with, its main purpose seems to be to put an article's talk page into a subcat of Category:Articles needing attention, after which it is forgotten. I think it is inherently less useful than tagging the article with an appropriate cleanup tag or discussing it on a wikiproject talk page. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:21, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * On some of the banners which do recognise attention - such as - the parameter is documented like


 * The problem is that "only if another parameter does not cover the need for attention" is something of a catch-all - not all of the likely situations are covered by other parameters. needs-infobox is one example, but even there, not all banners have that. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:40, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there any reason not to just mention the issue on the talk page of the wikiproject instead? Also, have you ever encountered a page where an explanation accompanied this flag? RockMagnetist (talk) 22:44, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I've never used it: I'm just aware of its presence. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:49, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I have been working through Category:Geology articles needing attention, and I have yet to see a clear need for the tag. Most of the articles just needed expanding. A couple had no references, but of course there are tags for that. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:44, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * For that matter, I don't see any good uses of the tag in Category:Architecture articles needing attention. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:49, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Another thing I am noticing is that the great majority were added several years ago. Maybe the flag made more sense at the time. RockMagnetist (talk) 00:00, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

It looks like this talk page doesn't get much attention. Any idea what the best forum would be for discussing a change that affects 5 million pages? RockMagnetist (talk) 20:08, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know of a suitable central location, except perhaps WP:VPM. -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:11, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Stick an rfc template on this section, and advertise the discussion at WP:VPM, WP:VPR, WP:VPT, WT:COUNCIL and WP:CENT. That should do the trick. — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 01:19, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks,, I like your idea. I think I'll start the rfc in a new section, though. RockMagnetist (talk) 02:47, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't see any value in these tags. A direct request on the talk page is far more likely to work.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:41, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to remove the attention tag
I propose that the flag attention be removed from WPBannerMeta. This is a flag that seemed to have its heyday around 2007, and its use has been declining ever since. It adds "This article has been marked as needing immediate attention" to the banner, and puts the talk page in a subcategory of Category:Articles needing attention. It has the following disadvantages: At best, this flag just clutters up the talk page. At worst, the user might apply it to a problem that actually does need immediate attention, thinking it will make a difference. It won't. RockMagnetist (talk) 03:00, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * No one really knows what to do with it. I have looked at about 50 flagged articles, and the issues have generally been: needs expanding, needs sources, or needs an expert.
 * A lot of the time, though, I can't tell what the reason for the flag is. There is rarely a detailed explanation.
 * For every issue that I can think of that needs immediate attention, there is an article tag that would serve better. Or a wikiproject talk page.
 * It is on the talk page, so if the problem is fixed, people tend to forget to remove the tag. So years later, there it still is.
 * Few people look at the categories (which is why so many of the articles have been there since 2007).
 * Some examples are at the talk pages shown in Category:Biology articles needing attention. Does anyone have an example of a useful attention tag? Johnuniq (talk) 04:21, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Here's some irony for you. I used the flag when adding a few banners to Talk:Bibliography of biology back in 2011. I have no idea why - it might have been a copy and paste. RockMagnetist (talk) 04:35, 1 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I see that Bibliographies, Aviation and Albums have particularly large categories of articles needing attention, so I notified them of this discussion. Bibliographies and Aviation have a lot of subcategories because they have added many more flags, but Albums doesn't. So maybe the best place to look for examples is Category:Albums articles needing attention. RockMagnetist (talk) 05:33, 1 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Perhaps it should be converted to a bot maintained parameter, that gets activated when a problem banner is attached to the article, and removed when the banner disappears. We would then decide which article tags would activate it. (ie. expert, too technical... ) -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 06:53, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Interesting idea. Mind you, that's essentially what a cleanup listing does without the middleman. And you can install a link to a nice report with everything organized in tables. RockMagnetist (talk) 13:40, 1 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Most maintenance tags are ignored for years. This one seems fairly harmless as it is tucked away on the talkpage. There is the bigger question of what should we do about all our maintenance tags. There are some huge backlogs. We have youngsters signing up and falling over themselves in a rush to deal with (usually revert) new contributions, but very few people willing to deal with our Backlog. We have over a 1/4 million articles needing sources, over 800 of them dating back to 2006: Category:Articles lacking sources. I work on maintenance backlogs now and again. I cleared Category:Articles to be split a while back, with some assistance from User:Op47. I see it's building up again, and that's the issue - it's an endless, ongoing task. However, I'm not sure the solution is to do away with clean up tags, as they are a means of identifying problems, but this certainly is a significant issue. Working on maintenance backlogs is not a task where people get badges or glory or even thanks. There is little attention paid to it, and it doesn't get talked about much. If someone could drum up a scheme whereby people are excited to work on maintenance backlogs, that would help.  SilkTork  <sup style="color:#347C2C;">✔Tea time  00:33, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I heartily agree that more people need to do maintenance. To avoid getting off-topic in this RfC, I'll say more on your talk page. RockMagnetist (talk) 01:01, 2 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Oppose per SilkTork. Even if sometimes mis-applied, it serves a purpose. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 03:10, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose—the function has utility, even if it's misused from time to time.  Imzadi 1979  →   03:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I have yet to see a statement from anyone about what the proper use for it is. RockMagnetist (talk) 04:11, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Support removal. It's historical as far as I can tell. If an article really needs "immediate attention", one should alert the WikiProject talk pages, which people actually watch, or Vandalism or any other high-traffic page. If it's just in bad shape, but doesn't need immediate fixes, that's what the normal maintenance banners are for. The maintenance banners already categorize problems, so this either creates duplicate listings or contradictory listings. It's not "harmless" if new editors don't go through the normal channels because they expect this flag to be useful. —Designate (talk) 13:32, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * This seems obsolete indeed. The general article cleanup tags are sufficient as such, while any specifically interested WikiProjects are alerted to actually pressing issues through RfCs and other things that are tracked by Article alerts. --Joy &#91;shallot&#93; (talk) 18:26, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree that it is harmless, but in practice useless. I add it myself, but no one cares to look at the category, no alerts appear on notifications, and the only watchlists that mich notice attention=yes are likely the people that caused the problem long long ago. Talking on the Project talk page always seems to get a better response for most of the projects I am in. I suggest that this parameter is turned off by default and only activated for particular projects on request by that project. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:39, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Is there a way to do that? RockMagnetist (talk) 23:07, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Oppose I find this category a good way to discover articles to edit, in need of attention, as intended. -- Auric    talk  00:58, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Support removal. The cost of complexity of yet-another-option that almost never matters is not worth it (remember, a zillion options that require the mental processing of "is this relevant?  I don't know" is part of the reason Wikipedia templates can be scary for newcomers).  For the very few people such as User:Auric who used it (which I commend you for!), you can likely get a similar result from looking at the Wikiproject talk page requests for help, or from looking through Unassessed / C-Class / stub articles in the Wikiproject articles by quality categories. SnowFire (talk) 18:24, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Support removal. There are many other places to go to find articles within a project's scope that need help. The "attention" flag is a very vague flag. It would be much easier and cleaner to simply find the articles that are common to the project's category and one of the cleanup categories. APerson (talk!) 02:13, 13 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Support removal, I agree with many above that the attention flag is too vague, and really would need a "reason" parameter to make it worthwhile to use, kind of like the Template:Cleanup now has. Funandtrvl (talk) 19:23, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

How do I remove this flag?
I have tried to remove the attention flag, and I'm stumped. At first it looked like the relevant code was in Template:WPBannerMeta/core, but removing it didn't make any difference in the sandbox tests. Anyone know how to do this? RockMagnetist (talk) 00:46, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * That would do it. I assume that the sandbox is still using the live core so that's why you noticed no change. But before doing this, I would like to try to ensure that there are no projects who are actively using this feature, because removing it for them could disrupt their work. If a project specifically wants the attention flag, it can be coded as a custom note for them before removing it as a default option from the meta-template. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:32, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Draft-class
I have started a discussion on possibly making Draft-class one of the default assessment classes used by WikiProjects. Any comments welcome at Village pump (proposals). Thank you &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:32, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
 * The discussion (see archive) seemed to arrive at the consensus to add draft-class to the extended quality scale. I will aim to do this shortly. We should consider whether to request a bot to create all the needed categories. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:53, 1 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't think the importance of a draft-class article should default to NA-importance. Pages in the draft namespace are essentially articles, so their importance can be assigned like any article. Thoughts? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:45, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * It defaults to NA if importance is omitted. If included, the value set there takes priority, see for example Draft talk:Ryan Sitton for Texas Railroad Commissioner but be quick; somebody might just slap a on its subject page. -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:46, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes I know, but articles will default to Unknown-importance. And I am suggesting that drafts should default to this as well. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:44, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I've made the change to Template:Importance mask but it's waiting on an update to Module:Pagetype. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:41, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Draftspace detection and auto-classification II
The discussion at Template talk:WPBannerMeta/Archive 10 was archived without anything being done. At Template:Class/colour, I've set a colour for Draft-class as a kind of brown: #d98159. The hue is 18.8°, which is about about 70% of the angle between Stub-class red (0°) and Start-class orange (26.7°), because drafts should be more complete than stubs, but are probably not yet Start-class. Unlike those two colours, which on the HSL scale are both 100% saturation and 70% lightness, I've set the Draft-class colour to 62.5% saturation and 60% lightness. 100%/70% would have been which is not much different from the colours for Template-class  and Start-class. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:13, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
 * The new colour looks very similar to Start-class. How about something completely different? I don't have any suggestions though. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:59, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The sequence from Stub-class to FA-class  is a progressive sequence around the colour wheel: Stub is at 0°; Start  26.7°; C  60°; B  90.2°; GA  120°; A  180°; FA 220°. Drafts shouln't be any better than Start-class (if they are, they should be moved to mainspace), so the hue angle couldn't be greater than 26.7°. Drafts ought to also be better than Stubs (otherwise, why even bother having them), so the hue angle couldn't be less than 0°. There is an apparent gap between 220° and 0°, but that is occupied by: Future-class  (229.5°); List-class  (257.1°); File-class  (260°); Current-class  (283.6°); and Portal-class  (345°), not forgetting that the importance scale (e.g. ) is at 300°. -- Red rose64 (talk) 12:05, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Additional classes?
I'm the last survivor of WikiProject University of Florida, and I am trying to add additional optional classes for Category, File and Template. I have already added the these class categories, as well as the "QUALITY_SCALE=extended" coding, and cannot figure out why they will not populate. Can someone help? I'm pretty sure there is a simple solution (if you know what you're doing, that is). Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 07:18, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * You did the right thing and it's working fine. Might just need to wait a few days for the categories to populate. (Related to the job queue. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:50, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Perfect. Thank you for checking on my handiwork; I have no particular expertise in wiki-coding.  Waiting for the categories to populate is easy -- it's not like waiting on Christmas when I was 3!  Cheers.  Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 08:17, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

TaskForce own importance ratings (not parent WikiProject's ratings)
would that be possible? thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:33, 8 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, see the example on the documentation,  -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:09, 8 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Fgnievinski (talk) 19:40, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 11 December 2014
Please replace Template:WPBannerMeta/core with Template:WPBannerMeta/core/sandbox to bring up to HTML5 standards. Thanks you. — &#123;&#123;U&#124;Technical 13&#125;&#125; (e • t • c) 16:13, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * You don't need to change "0" to "0px" or "0em" to produce valid HTML5; this syntax is already valid. See for example this validation output which doesn't pick up any of the zeroes. — <span style="color: #194D00; font-family: Palatino, Times, serif">Mr. Stradivarius  ♪ talk ♪ 22:05, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm aware of that, I make those changes to improve readability and ensure consistency. I guess it is just a personal preference to have perfectly clean code (yes, I try to be a perfectionist sometimes, and realize I most often fail.  So, I try - try again and maybe I eventually get it perfect). — &#123;&#123;U&#124;Technical 13&#125;&#125; (e • t • c) 22:20, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
 * See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#value-def-length - "after a zero length, the unit identifier is optional". Changing a perfectly-valid dimensionless zero to a dimensioned zero (0px, 0em etc.) under the umbrella of "HTML 5 compliance" is deceitful. Please stick to the changes that are demonstrably necessary according to the HTML 5 specification. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:20, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅ with [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WPBannerMeta/core&diff=637950983&oldid=476288832 this]. -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:32, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X
Hello everyone. I would like to introduce you all to WikiProject X, a community-led project to make WikiProjects easier to use and maintain. I am specifically reaching out to you all since I personally am interested in overhauling the banner system. Although changes to existing infrastructure will only be made with consensus—with the bulk of changes affecting specific WikiProjects, rather than site-wide functions—I would be interested in hearing your insights on the role played by WikiProject banners on organizing information about articles and raising awareness of WikiProjects. They are a substantial part of the WikiProject's workflow, after all. Please let me know if you have any particular thoughts or concerns. Thanks, Harej (talk) 07:02, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I would love to hear your proposals for overhaul, seriously. They can be, and actually in many cases are, among the hardest aspects of any project to keep updated, or, at least, the quality assessments are. If there were any way to standardize the quality assessment in a banner shell, so that the quality assessments can be spread across all banners involved, that would help a lot. John Carter (talk) 19:37, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * So I was looking around at how WPBannerMeta was coded. I have to say that it is one of the most convoluted and difficult-to-understand things I've ever seen on Wikipedia—and I can code wiki-tables and ParserFunctions from memory. But one of the things I noticed is that you have your choice of using the standard codes for importance/quality or having your own "bespoke" coding system. I do not begrudge projects for having needs specific to their subject areas, but I wonder: how necessary is this? From what I've seen, most WikiProjects use the same set of codes, with some having more codes but otherwise using the same system as everyone else. In other words, no project as far as I have seen has a code that is uniquely theirs. So why not merge all the possible code options into one system, and then WikiProjects can choose which ones they use?
 * In general, I think the main issue that's come with project banners is that they've succumbed to feature creep. They try to do too much. Feature creep on individual banners is compounded by overall banner creep. Again, I do not begrudge individual projects for their needs, and each project should have the equal ability to use talk pages. But as it is currently implemented, there is too much—too much text, too many links, too many buttons. It becomes overwhelming and instead of being useful, it's just too much information.
 * Incidentally, I came up with a demonstration of a "ProjectTags" template. The idea is to replace individual WikiProject banners with a single banner, where each project can get one line: a link to their project, their quality assessment, and their importance/priority rank. There would be an option for including more information, accessible via [show] button, mostly to get the buy-in of WikiProjects who still want to include more information. The ProjectTags concept removes some functionality, instead opting to present less content more clearly. In any case, this is not necessarily connected to WikiProject X, but rather a random idea I had. What do you think? Harej (talk) 21:39, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I know MILHIST has a few specific grades of quality assessment that others don't, because they have a lot more people active and involved in the effort there, but I have to say that for most all the other projects I've dealt with I like that a lot. John Carter (talk) 23:04, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * From what I can see on their project pages, their main deviation is that they have a distinct coding system for list (AL, BL, etc.). So not that huge a distinction, and as I said above, projects could just use the ones they want. I'm glad you like it! I'm waiting off on proposing a full-on substitution until we do our full analysis at WikiProject X; whatever banner system is used should fit in an overall workflow design. Harej (talk) 05:10, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Very commendable guideline being virtually ignored
In writing this here I am acting on the constructive advice of John Carter.

As a very strong believer in a guideline of ours, for reasons well addressed there, I would like to see it followed by everyone, i.e. that "Priority" be used, not "Importance" when assessing biographies, or at least that everbody stop arbitrarily assessing any biographies with "Importance: Low". How could we go about tying to improve on that?

Most banners seem to have been created, with the "importance" language, before the guideline took effect. Given the number of projects which use the older, less positive, "importance" rating, I would have to think that making changes to a banner, particularly the Meta banner, could tie up servers severely.

Proposals:


 * that assessment categories on talk pages be made hidden categories, which might be beneficial overall actually, as it decreases the somewhat bizarre fact of talk pages being "categorized" in so many ways;
 * that the word "importance" be substituted with the word "priority" in the appearance of the standard iteration of that template.

I would highly appreciate any constructive input. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 05:15, 12 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I strongly support the second: "Importance" and "priority" could be made synonyms first, and slowly replaced via AWB/script editing when the pages are being edited anyway.
 * I have no objection to the first idea. WhatamIdoing (talk)
 * Another thought, to add on to what suggested: we could have a bot set to systematically update the banners' display output and move the categories from "Top-importance Foo articles" to "Top-priority Foo articles", using aliases in the templates so that things stay categorized. I actually don't support hiding the assessment categories because I use those to find other articles.  Imzadi 1979   →   02:46, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I would personally oppose to this suggestion, because there is an important distinction between between the words "Importance" and "Priority," where the former indicates how vital the article is to Wikipedia, and the latter would suggest that it is important for the article to be worked on - that it should be a priority. High quality articles that are of top importance simply don't have as high a priority to be worked on. If "priority" is simply meant as a more neutral synonym to "importance", then I think the semantics would still stand in the way.
 * This did give me an idea, though: what if we added a priority parameter for high-importance, low-quality articles? That could help guide editors to work on articles that really need to be worked on, rather than stick with the top-importance articles. Perhaps there already exists a confusion between importance and priority? This is just me thinking out loud, though... ~ Mable ( chat ) 08:37, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Any WikiProject banner may be configured to recognise both importance and priority parameters, it can be done on a per-banner basis by ensuring that all occurrences of the line  or   (whichever is currently in the banner) is accompanied by the other, i.e.   In such cases, when that banner is used on individual talk pages importance has precedence over priority (i.e. priority is ignored if both are present on a talk page), but even if only priority is given on a talk page, it's described and categorised using the word "importance". To get the description, etc. to show "priority", it's necessary to omit the line   from the project banner itself. -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:41, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Based on what Redrose64 says above, it might be best to do make these changes on a template by template by template basis. ALso, based on what Maplestrip said, which is something I had not previously thought of, it might be very useful if we could, somehow, set up maybe some way of either automatically assigning through some means or manually through direct means some other parameter to indicate which articles are in most immediate attention than others. So that, as an example, Top priority articles of Stub or Start class, and maybe High priority articles of Stub class, might be classed together into a single list which some projects might be able to use to more quickly and effectively develop some of that weak content. John Carter (talk) 21:29, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've been testing it... it doesn't work. You can set up a project banner to recognise either importance or priority, but you can't set it up to recognise both - if you try what I suggested above, you'll find that priority is always ignored. It appears that  and   are mutually exclusive, you can't use them together. -- Red rose64 (talk) 23:51, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

I respectfully suggest that Mable  read the guideline I linked to in the second paragraph of my post here. That guideline, which I think is an excellent one, is what we are trying to find a way to implement here in real life. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 03:59, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I read the guideline, for as much as you can call it that. It basically says that both are allowed and that importance is sometimes seen as more controversial, which would be a reason to use "priority" instead. It says that this is the choice of the Wikiproject as well. I understand why Wikiproject biographies use priority rather importance, but it seems like the Wikiproject I am most active at feels the same way: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games
 * The fact that the guidelines allow both ways doesn't mean that a mass change should happen, after all. ~ Mable ( chat ) 10:18, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't quite see allow where something is that clearly recommended against and for such good reasons. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 12:55, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

We are talking about the following lines, right? "Some projects also make importance assessments. It should be noted, however, that these tend to be more controversial (since calling articles 'unimportant' may upset some editors and talk page readers); as a result, some projects (such as Military history) do not assess importance, while others (such as Biography) only undertake importance assessments for a limited set of articles and use the term 'priority' to decrease perception problems." I read this as "Importance" being the standard, that this is sometimes controversial (I have yet to see any kind of controversy about it, but I'm sure they exist) and that because of that, some Wikiprojects don't make such assessments or have simply renamed it to "Priority." There isn't even a guideline here? There is no "you should" or "it's better to" statement present, and the choice between "importance," "priority" or not making use of this parameter at all is completely optional per Wikiproject. ~ Mable ( chat ) 10:04, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree that priority would be (slightly) preferable to the word importance for these assessments. A change to the wording could be made very easily in the meta-template, but I suggest a discussion of greater prominence (e.g. on WP:VPR) would be needed to establish the consensus for such a change. I don't think it would be worth the trouble in renaming all the categories however, and I can't see much benefit in making these categories hidden. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:28, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Are we sticking to the subject - biographies - here? And are we trying, or not trying, to see, or trying not to see, why the guideline, or whatever you want to call it, or don't want to call it, clearly stands on the side of "Importance" being inappropriate - for biographies? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 12:50, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I was under the impression that we were discussing the use of this template in general - I was unaware that your suggestion was limited to Wikiproject Biographies. In that case, I don't have any objections. One comment, though: the guideline that Wikiproject Biographies is using "priority" rather than "importance" should probably be made clear somewhere within the Wikiproject itself. If this is the only place where it is mentioned, then I can understand why many people incorrectly use "importance" rather than "priority."
 * For the specific case of, it's set up to recognise either priority or importance and treat them identically (they're both described and categorised as 'importance'), with one difference: if you use priority the article is placed in hidden ; if you use importance it's not. Both of them will put the article in hidden , because it is preferred that the more specific parameters like a&e-priority filmbio-priority musician-priority etc. be used instead. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:29, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Let me try to be clearer: we need to find a way (adhering to the considerate and excellent WP guideline I'm referring to) to make sure that no biographies are assessed as "Importance: Low" and thet "Priority" is used in assessing all biographies on English Wikipedia, no matter what project (nationality projects or others) assesses them. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 21:20, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Then this is the wrong place. Altering how behaves is a matter for Template talk:WikiProject Biography/WT:WikiProject Biography. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:34, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
 * That's not what John Carter told me (please see first line above!). National projects apparently circumvent WikiProject Biography and thus sidestep the guideline. I believe Carter understood that part of the problem. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 16:22, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * In what way do national projects circumvent WikiProject Biography? I assume that by "national projects", you mean e.g. WikiProject United States, WikiProject Germany etc. These are free to set their own importance/priority ratings, and an article deemed e.g. low priority by WikiProject Biography may well be rated high importance by WikiProject United States. If you want to change the way works, you must involve that Project - it cannot be decided over their heads. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:07, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't think I said anything like that, or, if that is how it was perceived, was that what I meant. It is true that the same quality assessment criteria are applied at the time of an assessment, but that does not mean that the same terms (like "importance" or "priority") are necessarily used simply because they are the same terms. I do not believe Serge has fully understood that the "priority" option is not available in most templates, however much he might wish otherwise. If he wants to institute changes in banners other than the Biography banner, like specifically the Sweden banner, it would probably be best and most effective to do so on a template by template basis. If he finds resistance to those changes, and he might I don't know, then it is not unreasonable for him to deal with that, or, perhaps, draw more attention to the GUIDE than it has received. I regret to say that page has not gotten a lot of attention, and it may well be that the current phrasing is itself perhaps out of step with the community. John Carter (talk) 19:34, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

It seems I need to remind everyone again that this section is not about assessing articles but only concerns the use of the word Importance (against guideline) rather than the word Priority (as per guideline) when assessing biographies. If that could be clear to everyone once and for all, maybe it would be possible to discuss constructively how all WP editors regardless of project, could be convinced, or helped mechanically, not to use Importance. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:40, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The guideline that you linked says while others (such as Biography) only undertake importance assessments for a limited set of articles and use the term "priority" to decrease perception problems. It's clearly not a universal rule, since it specifically names one WikiProject, as an example of "others", which implies a subset of the whole. Is it your intention to make that guideline enforcable on all projects, to some (which ones?), or just to WikiProject Biography? -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:12, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
 * All artcles which are biographies (regardless of what project does the assessing), because those articles are biographies. No other articles of any kind. And only Importance/Priority assessments (as so well addressed by that guideline in regard to biographies), no other assessments of any kind. It's so frustrating not to be able to make this clear, but I do appreciate your asking, and I'm willing to keep trying. Perhaps you are unaware that many other projects, such as national projects, assess our biographies, not just Biography? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 23:30, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't matter who assesses articles. If the only banner template that is affected by this is, it is that template, and not (or its many subtemplates) which needs to be altered in order for the  template to display the word "priority"; so long as that template displays the word "importance", nothing that we say or do here will make the slightest difference. It is therefore not a matter for this page, but a matter for Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography, or for Template talk:WikiProject Biography - either way, consensus needs to be obtained from that WikiProject before we start changing the behaviour of their banner. -- Red rose64 (talk) 00:06, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * OK, here's an example, of hundreds, of a biography clearly having been assessed as "Importance: Low". Now does anyone understand what I'm getting at? The guideline is being circumvented, and I'd like to suggest we be constructive and try to fix that. I still think John Carter understood what I meant when I wrote to him about it, before starting this discussion here, as he then suggested. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 20:22, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * No, I don't understand what you're getting at. The talk page has  - there is no importance parameter. I have not removed it, and nor have you (the last edit to that talk page was three months ago). What is your problem? -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:58, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * It's the Sweden template that has the low-importance. So it seems the OP is proposing that all wikiproject banner templates switch to this wording. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:23, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Is that right, ? Are you suggesting that should use priority for their banner template when it's used on the talk page of a biography, and importance when used on the talk page of any other kind of article? -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:40, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Martin: when assessing biographies, not other articles.
 * Redrose: All projects not just Sweden, since the commendable guideline refers to all biographies.
 * I'm not experienced at all with how that could be done, technically, but as far as I can figure out, John Carter had good ideas here at 18:42 on 10 January 2015. Thank you both for trying to help me figure out what to do! --SergeWoodzing (talk) 21:52, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I've checked the 1,138 members of and the 199 members of  (between them, I believe that this covers every WikiProject banner template), and have found that use of priority is actually very rare. It's used in, , , , , , , , , , , , and possibly two more that are highly unusual in several other aspects . Of these fourteen, eleven (all except Biography and the last two) treat priority as an alias for importance, and it's displayed and categorised as "importance". There are no WikiProject banners which use priority exclusively; and in some cases where both are recognised (such as Biography), using priority will actually put the talk page into an error tracking category.
 * It should be remembered that if a WikiProject banner - like - sets low, this means that the topic is relatively unimportant within the context of that specific WikiProject. That topic might be a person who is very significant in a certain field - like science - but this should not affect the importance rating for Sweden; instead, they might be set as mid or even high by WikiProject Physics. The general guide is at Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria. -- Red rose64 (talk) 00:11, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much for doing all that work! Very interesting and very nice to see that the projects which do use priority are likely to have a high amount of biographies to assess and are being considerate. Is there any feasible way that that guide, which deals with all sorts of articles, could be brought into line with the commendable guideline I'm talking about here, regarding biographies only? --SergeWoodzing (talk) 00:33, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
 * With the exception of and the obvious exception of, I don't see that the WikiProjects that I indicated are any more likely to have biographies within their purview than (say) , , , , , , , , , or , all of which recognise importance but not priority. Practically all WikiProjects will have some biogs, so the remaining ten aren't unusual in that respect. They are, however, unusual in that they permit priority as an alias for importance, and so there is a case that those 11, which form less than 1% of the total, should be brought in line with the majority.
 * If you want Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Criteria changing, that again, is not a matter for this page. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:45, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I do not, because I don't think that's what I've asked for, but I am now at a loss for any additional way to try explain what I've asked for, to you, any clearer than I already have.
 * Would it be better for us to go against the commendable guideline on assessing biographies, by now making 11 projects not follow it, than trying to find some way to bring everyone into line? ProcectSweden, just to name one national project, has arbitrarily assessed hundreds and hundreds of biographies as "Importance:Low" during the last 5-6 years, and I know for a fact that some WP:BLP issues are being discussed, to Wikipedia's detriment, in that regard.
 * It's a good idea to try to fix this, not a good idea to try not to fix it, in my opinion. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 21:10, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Late reply to Mable: I think you've misunderstood the purpose. This was set up for the WP:1.0 team, which makes offline copies of Wikipedia (but only a fraction of the articles). "Priority" and "Importance" are treated identically by that process. Whatever you call it, declaring something to be "Top" doesn't mean that you need to improve it right away; it means that your group believes that it definitely needs to be included in offline releases, even if it's a poor article.

Both names make sense in that context: It's very "important" to include that article, and that article should get top "priority" for inclusion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I stopped following this conversation once I realized I misunderstood its purpose and context - no worries :) When this topic was brought up at a Wikiproject, it seemed like its results would directly affect said Wikiproject, but I now understand that this is not the case. Nevermind me — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maplestrip (talk • contribs) 08:36, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Moving forward
As far as I know there is no technical means to detect whether a template is on a biography and switch the wording accordingly. (That would require a template to "know" about the presence of another template on the same page.) Therefore it's all or nothing. There is the option to change the default wording for all WikiProject banners from "importance" to "priority". As I mentioned above, I don't think you would find consensus to move all (more than 10,000) the categories around. So one question is whether editors would get confused by having an article described as high priority but categorised as high importance? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:49, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you! To me, any such confusion would be less important than avoiding overt "Importance" labels on biographies, and I suppose it wouldn't hurt to see "Priority" everywhere. ? Regular readers do look at talk pages quite often (much more often than they notice categories, I think), and changing those bolded assessments on top there, which is the first thing many notice, would be a huge improvement, and adhere quite well to the commendable guideline re: bios. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 16:51, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I think that having the banner display the less-offensive "priority" language would be fine, even if the internal contents are still stuck at "importance". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
 * To achieve that we will need to do the following:
 * Change the meta-template to use the term "priority" instead of "importance" (this is easily done by applying this change).
 * Change every banner template to accept the parameter priority as well as importance. (Otherwise confusion may ensue, as editors see the word "priority" but cannot change it by using that parameter name.)
 * Demonstrate consensus for this change. (This discussion has not been sufficiently publicised or attended yet.)
 * &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:43, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Transclusion of to-do lists on WikiProject tags
There is a proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. Please comment there. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:05, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Automatically assessed categories
Based on this CFD, is it possible to remove the automatically assessed categories so that they aren't required for Category:WPBannerMeta templates with missing categories? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes on a per banner basis, for example, [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WikiProject_Snooker&diff=654252116&oldid=508259571 this edit on Template:WikiProject_Snooker] -- WOSlinker (talk) 22:58, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * But shouldn't we change the default since the CFD seems to be against their general creation? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:29, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
 * How about for those projects who have a non-existent category, we simply remove the auto parameter from those banners? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:50, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Error message on WPBannerMeta page
The top of the Template:WPBannerMeta page shows the following error right now:
 *  Lua error in Module:Navbar at line 23: Invalid title Template:WikiProject . 

It might be only cosmetic but something's 'broken' somewhere. Due to cascade-protection a (template code savvy) admin'll need to fix it.

Also Template:WPBannerDoc, listed under "See also" in this template's doc, displays a further error that could do with being fixed:
 * WPBannerDoc error: required first parameter missing

Cheers --146.199.151.33 (talk) 21:02, 19 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The first part of your request is now fixed. -- WOSlinker (talk) 22:21, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yellow check.svg Partly done: The red error message at Template:WPBannerDoc is intentional, it shows that the template is not to be used without parameters. -- Red rose64 (talk) 08:36, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree done that way it does the job, yep. Thanks WOSlinker and Redrose64 both. –146.199.151.33 (talk) 23:40, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject Directory pages
Please an we add a link to pages like WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Chemistry? the Link text should be something like "Automated statistics for WikiProject Chemistry". Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:39, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Can this be repurposed for Wikisource?
Is there any chance this template can be exported or redesigned to tag works under the jurisdiction of wikiprojects at Wikisource? Abyssal (talk) 18:19, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It's not a single template, but a whole group. Besides there are most (if not all) of [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=WPBannerMeta&namespace=10 these], and the names aren't consistent so there are others too. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:44, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I recognize that it would be a lot of work, but our sister projects need the ability to denote pages as belonging to individual Wikiprojects just as bad as Wikipedia itself does. Abyssal (talk) 01:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 14 August 2015
First line, needs a closing quote " before the closing brace >

which is always hidden on mobile. Here's the rule:  The same rule causes many other box-type templates to be hidden on mobile, such as navboxes. -- Red rose64 (talk) 11:25, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

MAIN CAT categorizes talk pages not articles
The MAIN CAT function categorizes talk pages not articles (e.g. Category:WikiProject United States articles) - is there a markup which can be used to fix this? Perhaps using the magic word? Oncenawhile (talk) 11:30, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by "the MAIN CAT function"? I don't see anything like that at . -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:29, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I mean the MAIN CAT parameter shown in Template:WPBannerMeta. It ensures that all these banners automatically categorize the pages in their wikiproject categories. Oncenawhile (talk) 09:01, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The parameter MAIN_CAT (note, the underscore cannot be replaced with a space) is used to set a category name, it is the category into which all pages bearing the WikiProject banner will be placed. So since Template:WikiProject United States has WikiProject United States articles then any page that has will be placed in . It's working as designed. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:05, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Remove importance for draft-class
We get a fair amount of drafts at WPVG, but when a page in draftspace is auto-classified as such, the template still requires an "importance" rating. How could we remove this requirement (i.e., make it like template/category in not requiring an importance assessment)? czar 16:30, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Amend Template:Importance mask, I would think. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:58, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Template:Importance mask was amended and draft articles now default to NA importance. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:06, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments
I'm planning to make some changes to Template:WPBannerMeta/comments to remove the functionality to encourage use of /Comments subpages. This was removed from the main template years ago. Also to detect redirects and treat them appropriately. There's some code in Template:WPBannerMeta/comments/sandbox. : I notice that you worked on this template last, adding styling parameters, etc. Are you aware of any banners calling this as a hook? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:05, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
 * There are loads of banners that still have comments enabled but there is only one that has the SHOW_INLINE option enabled, which is Template:WikiProject Tree of Life and it only has 6 articles with comments, so perhaps the SHOW_INLINE option could also be removed? -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:24, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Good idea, will do. I was just wondering why you added parameters like bgcolor and style which were not passed from the main template. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:43, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm sure it was used somewhere at one point but it doesn't appear to be anymore. I searched for [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=insource%3A%2FSHOW_INLINE%2F&fulltext=Search&ns10=1&profile=advanced SHOW_INLINE] and bgcolor and style are no longer in use. -- WOSlinker (talk) 00:14, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

User:WOSlinker, are you aware of any non-standardised banners making use of comments? (I'm aware of maths, are there any others?) Thanks &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:58, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
 * , only other one is Template:WikiProject U.S. Roads. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:06, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Also, the following [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=insource%3A%2F\%2FComments%2F&fulltext=Search&ns10=1&profile=advanced search] may be useful. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:10, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Allow taskforce icons to be unlinked?
Many users not familiar with Wikipedia would probably assume, seeing an icon that represents a task force, that clicking it would bring them to that task force, as that is how most web pages and GUIs are designed. I understand why we need to have those images link to their description pages if the images use a license with an Attribution requirement. However, many of the taskforce icons that are being used with this template, due to them having to be simple and recognizable enough at small sizes, are either public domain or have licenses without an attribution requirement. Would it be beneficial to add a parameter to allow these images be unlinked? I personally think the benefits in usability would outweigh the potential for misuse, especially on templates like WikiProject Philosophy where the icon is just a dot, and clicking it taking you to an image page is definitely not the expected behavior. --Ahecht (<span style="color:#FFF;background:#00f;display:inline-block;padding:1px 1px 0;vertical-align:-0.3em;line-height:1;font-size:50%;text-align:center;">TALK PAGE ) 14:43, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
 * That's fine if the image is PD or certain other non-copyright license. But if it's copyright (for example the Constellations taskforce at uses File:Astro constel task force.svg, which is licensed GFDL with CC BY-SA), a link is normally required for attribution. -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:30, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
 * As I suggested on Template talk:WikiProject Philosophy (with some agreement from Ahecht), outputting a simple bulleted list where an image is not required or useful would perhaps be better than a confusing user experience. I agree that being able to switch off linking for PD images might be an acceptable option when used correctly, but there is the possibility for abuse (not necessarily malicious); might Lua be able to automatically disallow delinking if the image licence is inappropriate? <b style='font:1rem Arial;color:#066;text-decoration:inherit;'>f<i style='font-size:.7em;color:#0bb;'>red</i>g<i style='font-size:.7em;color:#0bb;'>andt</i></b> 16:51, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject Korea
Could someone please have a quick look at the WikiProject Korea banner? Intended behaviour is for the working groups to be collapsed if more than one is displayed, but there seems to be an issue with the politics working group. For example:

It's not obvious to me what the problem is, so any help appreciated. PC78 (talk) 02:37, 18 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Fixed with [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WikiProject_Korea&diff=725858954&oldid=685693147 this edit]. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:38, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Many thanks! PC78 (talk) 14:31, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Multiple portals?
Is there any way for the banner to link to more than one portal? Specifically this would be of use to WikiProject Lancashire and Cumbria, where the main portals are Portal:Lancashire and Portal:Cumbria. PC78 (talk) 15:01, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Have a look at e.g. Template:WikiProject Trains which has a variable list of one to five portals displayed. You can see them all at Talk:East Croydon station. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:44, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, I gave it a go but it's a bit of a hack and the banner text doesn't sit right. Portal supports multiple parameters, is there no way of having the BannerMeta do so as well? PC78 (talk) 10:55, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Where did you try it? -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:23, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Template:WikiProject Lancashire and Cumbria/sandbox. Meh, it's not a major issue, the current banner is probably fine as it is. PC78 (talk) 14:31, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Namespace defaults
Would it be reasonable for banners placed on Module talk pages to default to Template-Class, and for banners placed on TimedText talk pages to default to File-Class? Currently these are both treated as NA-Class. PC78 (talk) 12:55, 29 June 2016 (UTC)


 * This change would need to be made in Class mask. A similar request was mentioned on the talk page in Oct 2015 but was not followed up. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:34, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
 * An edit may be all that's necessary. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:05, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I'd imagine it's not hard to do from a technical point of view, but are there any valid arguments for not doing this? Can we do similar for the likes of Help talk, Education Program talk, etc.? I should probably have a look at how WikiProject banners are actually being used in these namespaces. PC78 (talk) 00:15, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I've made some further comments over at Template talk:Class mask. Probably best to continue the discussion there rather than splitting it over two pages. PC78 (talk) 02:52, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject Essays
Can someone take a look at WikiProject Essays? The banner has an "impact" rating (basically a renamed importance) but it doesn't appear to be adding pages to any categories. PC78 (talk) 01:07, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
 * You would need to undo [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WikiProject_Essays&diff=645524862&oldid=524978854 this edit] from Feb 2015 to fix it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:44, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Excluding categories and files from MAIN_CAT
I'm helping to set up User:HotArticlesBot/Subscriptions for WP:VG. I added the param that populates Category:WikiProject Video games articles but it appears to include categories and files but we'd like to exclude those (only want articles, e.g., stub through redirect). How can we best configure MAIN_CAT to work this way? czar 20:38, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Are you aware of any other WikiProjects that make such a distinction? -- Red rose64 (talk) 23:07, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
 * No, but I'd imagine they might want the distinction all the same (otherwise the "articles" part of the category would be technically incorrect, including files, cats, project pages, etc.) If it helps, WPVG didn't even use its MAIN_CAT until today and I imagine others are in the same boat czar  23:33, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily. Many WikiProjects subscribe to Article Alerts, and there are various ways for the Article Alerts system to decide if a page should be treated as belonging to a WikiProject. One of these is by the presence of the MAIN_CAT category on a talk page; if you look at Article alerts/Subscription list you will see many entries with "Talk category:", such as the very first entry, that for WikiProject Abu Dhabi, which is set up to pick up pages in, and if any of its categories or files were sent to WP:CFD or WP:FFD, they will show up at WikiProject Abu Dhabi/Article alerts. This one doesn't have any CfDs or FfDs at the moment, but several others with the same method do have, such as WikiProject Adelaide/Article alerts. I don't imagine that these WikiProjects would want to have non-article XFDs hidden from them. -- Red rose64 (talk) 08:34, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, the projects in those cases wouldn't be interested. But I'm not looking to change the default—I'm asking how this can be configured for an individual WikiProject that wants to exclude all cats, files, project pages from its MAIN_CAT listing, or otherwise how they can separate the firehose list of all project talk pages from the list of just article talk pages czar  15:19, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Maybe this? |MAIN_CAT           = I'd try it in the sandbox first though. PC78 (talk) 15:43, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
 * , thanks! It appears to be working. Populating now. Eye close font awesome.svg czar  18:29, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I had certainly considered that: but before suggesting it, I wanted to be sure that there would be no adverse impact. Hence my q "Are you aware of any other WikiProjects that make such a distinction?" -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:13, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Sure, but I assume Czar is acting on behalf of the WikiProject so I think it's best to let them get on with it. And if it does cause any problems and needs to be undone, then it won't be the end of the world. :) PC78 (talk) 00:39, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Problem on Azerbaijani Wikipedia
Hi. I copy this template to Azerbaijani Wikipedia include necessary templates. But I have problem. There is appears at the bottom of template. Can you help me, pls? Sample : az:İstifadəçi:Aabdullayev851/Qaralama2 --Aabdullayev851 (talk) 08:01, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That is mw:Extension:PageAssessments (see thread above). If you haven't got that extension installed you can just remove that part of the code. Regards &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:51, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your respond MSGJ. But I have to ask some question again to be clear. Extension not installed on Azerbaijani wikipedia. Which part of code I have to remove and what is function of this part? --Aabdullayev851 (talk) 06:49, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Search in WPBannerMeta/core (at the end) for the section with inside the noinclude tags and remove it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I remove followin part of code :


 * And what is function of this part? --Aabdullayev851 (talk) 08:51, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You would have to read all of Template talk:WPBannerMeta to work that out. But anyway, it's only a recently added feature, so you should be fine without it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:16, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much. --Aabdullayev851 (talk) 10:27, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

role="presentation"
you had some stuff going on in the sandbox including adding role="presentation". I've just removed these so I can work on some code for PageAssessments, but did you intend to formally propose these changes? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:08, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Oops, I totally forgot about that. I'd still like to propose that edit, but I don't remember if I saw errors in the testcases. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 14:29, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Automatic assessment parameters
What parameters need to be set such that a new project (new WPBannerMeta instance) will automatically categorize categories and redirects based on the namespace & article space content? czar 16:45, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * For posterity, the answer appears to be setting  and creating a separate   subpage (see example) to add automatic redirect classification support.  czar  21:46, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Unless I've misunderstood your question, I think the standard class mask will do this anyway &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:15, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * As I understood it, was asking about overriding the default behaviour, where if there is no QUALITY_SCALE parameter, standard is assumed, and both categories and redirects are automatically dropped into NA-Class.
 * Setting extended gives cats their own rating, but not redirs. To get redirects classified, it is necessary to use either inline or subpage, and the associated with that needs yes -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:44, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Yep, that czar  21:06, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

And old idea, revisited
Way back in 2009, I had an idea for displaying the importance on the banner, which lead to a couple of redesign. There was a couple of other possible features suggested, but some weren't possible at the time for either technical reasons, code-messiness, or whatever.

I decided to update my sandbox (User:Headbomb/Sandbox/Banner) to illustrate a few more idea. I'm not saying we need to implement them all, but I think a few of them are interesting enough to at least consider implementing. In particular, the collapsed banner could display, the importance, vitality (current icon/general design is a mockup), and the various 'issues flagged' icons of the article. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:10, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
 * a lot &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:55, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
 * What would be required to make that happen, technically? Can/could WPBS inherit things from its nested templates somehow? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:59, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
 * There are some things I like and some things I don't like... First impression, it seems like information overload. Having both vitality and importance is going to be confusing. Also I don't think it's a good idea to rely so heavily on icons, as few people are going to know what they actually signify. I would favor simplifying the template. My favorite implementation is at French Wikipedia which uses:


 * So clean and simple. My first suggestion would be to remove the "attention required", "needs infobox", and "needs image" parameters entirely, as there's no point having them set per WikiProject in the first place. Those should just be separate templates that have nothing to do with WikiProjects. I do like having the most common class percolate to the collapsed view. I also think the over-all layout and design is an improvement in Headbomb's version. Can we move in that direction but keep it a bit simpler? Kaldari (talk) 21:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I agree that the infobox needed/etc don't really need to be set at the project level, I put it there mostly because of backwards compatibility. The best implementation would probably be to set it once, and have it trickle down to all projects. Concerning vitality/importance, it's already kinda done, although not in that specific way. There's a distinct banner for it. It could be retained as a distinct banner, but my way gets rid of that banner and frees up space, and having a more efficient use of space was one of my goals. I made a second mockup, which might be more to your liking. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:05, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
 * We could also make it so that the project icons are only displayed if the project is expanded. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:44, 14 February 2017 (UTC)


 * . How do you feel about the second mockup? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:24, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I like the second one a lot better. Kaldari (talk) 18:25, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Great idea and I think it can be even further simplified. Working from Mockup 2, I'd remove the individual class ratings from each row (having it set and displayed only once, at the top). Our banners have been quite bulky with whitespace. I wonder how each line would work with the height of, say, the "WikiProject Australia" line in the current example. We might even begin to list the taskforces in rows of two, which would save even more space... Food for thought czar  17:39, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Different projects can and will rate articles differently, so we need a per-project rating. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:04, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Projects can rate importance differently, but I don't recall ever seeing an article with projects that disagreed on class rating. I think that's what Kaldari was alluding to with the frwp template code example above. czar  21:45, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Maths may want a word with you :P — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 21:48, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * As does WP:CHEM, who doesn't recognized FA/GA, many projects who have A-class like WP:MILHIST that other projects don't recognize, and projects with custom classes like B+, AL, BL, etc... Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:27, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
 * If WP:CHEM doesn't recognise FA/GA, why are these explicitly listed in the documentation of Template:WikiProject Chemistry and also in the template's custom class mask? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 00:31, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Must be new. I knew a while ago they systematically purged all FA/GA because they didn't recognized those processes as legit. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:37, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

No project is forced to opt-in, but we are discussing a unified rating when the banner shell is closed. It's fine for projects that do their own special classification to not be included the unified template at all. If they're not interested in the standardization, I'd rather see their templates left as they are rather than complicating the unified template. As a side note, I think a unified WikiProject template would coincide well with the WikiProjects that also move their classifications into Wikidata. czar 18:30, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Sooo... what's next here? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:23, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I would be interested in working on a unified rating system. As I've written elsewhere I think it should happen alongside a complete overhaul of the whole rating system. But we can do incremental improvements too ;) &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:49, 10 March 2017 (UTC)