Talk:Glossary of cue sports terms/Archive 4

Adjustment to reference
the down-trou reference refers to a scene in a NZ film Stickmen. The character wayne (scott willis) is playing a character refered to as "Pinhead" this is incorrect, the characters name is "Caller" as is stated after the actual down-trou "Jeez, Caller how do piss through that thing" &#91;The previous unsigned comment was posted by User:Frothym, 12:20, 14 May 2008&#93;


 * Please sign your posts (put ~ after them). Anyway, I'll make the correction. PS: please use the same heading levels ( ==Heading== ) as everyone else; I had to fix yours.—  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 12:44, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Split
Someone has added longish to the glossary and they have a point. What do you think about splitting it into say Glossary of cue sports terms (A-L) and Glossary of cue sports terms (M-Z) (which division seems to split the articles current text approximately in half)? Is it necessary? If so, how would we go about fixing every Cuegloss link?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:36, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I was thinking that just the other day, actually, when it took over a minute to load the thing for editing. The split sounds about right (for the next year or so >;-)  I can handle the Cuegloss fixes with AWB, after I upgrade the template; it will need to have a new syntax something like, , etc.  (It could be simpler, like , but using the actual letter would make it future-proof, since the only thing needed to change if article further subdivided is what pages the template points to.  NB: I have seen other long glossaries on WP split in this way, so it wouldn't be unusual.  The original name would should just redir to the A-L page.
 * A related issue would be rewriting it to use lower case (except for proper nouns) in the entries. While this would be a variance from the MOS on heading capitalization, it is one that makes sense, would reduce user confusion (esp. with regard to things like "english"), and would make the syntax of Cuegloss simpler in most uses: ; the final field would remain available for variant cases, e.g .  This should be discussed more fully at WT:CUEGLOSS, of course, but might as well raise it with you now.
 * PS: Did you get my e-mail last week? —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 04:41, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. I'm not opposed to lowercase in theory but I'm wondering if it would look unencyclopedic. English is the only one I can think of that could be affected by this as to actual usage and I'm not sure just because its entry was made lowercase this would have that usage effect. Certainly, it would make placing the cuegloss template slightly easier with one less parameter necessary, but have you found anyone who wanted to use it who was stymied by this issue? Another words, I'm not sure we should change the standard appearance of a glossary unless there are profound advantages; our first concern is apparance for readers. Some other things to think about: 1) All the internal links in the glossary that after the split refer to definitions in the split off part (they will be numerous on both sides) must be changed to a full pipe to the other page; 2) Before we split, we need to identify every reference used more than once using and if the full entry is before the split, and there are later uses after the split point, duplicate the initial full reference for the first after-split use (was that too convoluted to follow?). Checking my email now.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:15, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I followed you. I can do the #1 cleanup in BBEdit reasonably easily. #2 won't be hard either.  I hear you on the case issue; I have seen it done in at least 1 other glossary here, or I wouldn't've brought it up.  See Glossary of poker terms to see what it looks like.  I think it looks okay, but am not wedded to the idea.  The main benefit would be making Cuegloss easier to use (more of a factor soon, after the split, than now). Not a huge deal either way. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 01:15, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually I looked at the poker glossary and it doesn't look bad at all that way. Also should we switch to the anchor method they use (is that even feasible with cuegloss template usage)? Let's you and I decide on a split point and coordinate tasks. I think it's up to you to first have the new Cuegloss template ready.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Right. I think we'd better copy all this over to the glossary's talk page, just for the record. Haven't looked at the anchor stuff yet. The A-L/M-Z split point already discussed should work fine. Hmm. I'm going to have to hack CompactTOC8 to work across multiple pages, too.  &lt;ponder&gt; 21:21, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Been way too busy to even touch this, but I haven't forgotten it. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 12:44, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * PS: The Anchor business is fantastic; using it for all likely attempts to get at a heading (e.g., ignoring the case issue for now) will greatly reduce the number of attempts at cueglossing that don't actually link to anything valid. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 14:26, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * As I make edits or add new entries I've been placing these anchors. Of course, we're increasing the size (!), but you're right that they are very useful.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:55, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I was looking into maybe doing the split soon-ish, but AWB's latest several versions have severe bugs when it comes to tracking down and editing a particular template's inclusions on article and other pages. Can't do what needs to be done until this is resolved by the AWB development team. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 03:55, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
 * What if we create "sub-articles" fort the article (like: Glossary of cue sports terms/A) and then transclude them to it. Armbrust  Talk  Contribs  00:41, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * We can't; it's against policy (on en.wiki). No /whatever subarticles, and no use of transclusions to obscure article content. It will need to be split, but we can't be "tricky" about it. It's just basically going to be a pain in the butt. :-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 07:41, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I think we can solve this by converting the first parameter into a switch-parameter and define what the template should do by each parameter. Just like WWEPPV looks different as (at Royal Rumble) and as  (at WrestleMania). And this way we can split the article several times if needed. What do you think? Armbrust Talk  Contribs  10:25, 7 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll take a look at that code. I already had a pretty well-developed plan for this, but maybe someone else has already done something cooler. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 22:00, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Rationale for split perhaps questionable today
I'm no longer convinced that that a split is necessary or even useful. I want to research the "WP pulse" on what today really is considered "too long" and if the concerns about "too long" articles are really valid any longer (as I recall from 3 or so years ago, the issue was that some quite old browsers wouldn't handle long articles right, especially when editing, but they're now even older, and even less used). It would be preferable to not split the article at all. I understand that some poor people in Belize and Jamaica have shite decade-old computers running Win95 or MacOS 8 and Netscape 2.x, but we cannot dumb down the entire service for marginal users, who are used to problems and limitations already, and who surely have way bigger fish to fry than being able to edit a cue sports glossary easily. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 22:00, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
 * If length is not as pressing an issue as it once was, I agree of course that it's better to keep it all in one place. I was never gung ho about splitting—just resigned to the technical benefits of it, as I took as read from WP:LENGTH.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:33, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

[outdent] I've brought the matter up more broadly, using this article as an example, at Wikipedia talk:Article size, and suggested significant changes over there. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 10:08, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Split The article should be split into 3-4 articles, to get under 100 kB.--Jax 0677 (talk) 18:36, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Oppose: The rationale for splitting regular articles is very different for splitting lists, and especial glossaries. See MOS:GLOSS for why. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿ ¤ þ  Contrib.  23:53, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Comment Though it may appear that there is no need for PCs and other such platforms, perhaps trying to open it with a smartphone or tablet should be looked into to see what issues may be raised? Chaosdruid (talk) 14:45, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Support: I tried to open this on my smartphone and it was a nightmare. Azylber (talk) 16:26, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Any online content of notable size and complexity poses difficulties for smartphones, though they are much more capable devices today than two years ago. It's not a case we can optimize for.  Because the principal purpose of this article is providing centralized link targets for hundreds of cue sports jargon terms as used in hundreds of WP articles, it's completely implausible to split this list, unless and until someone replaces the code behind Template:Cuegloss with a Lua module that can parse the link terms and change the glossary sub-article target on the fly, based on the first letter of the term.  This isn't an earth-shaking programming task, but until someone does it, the article can't be split.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:08, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Mobile devices now have much more RAM than they did in 2015, often 8 GB or higher.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:48, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Update: Recent (2023) discussions at WT:SIZE are even less in favor of splitting articles because of arbitrary size concerns than they were before, especially if it hampers readers finding the information they are looking for. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:48, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Changes to the introduction
A few paragraph introduction is not too much of a burden on our readers. The information should be set forth right there instead of being funnelled to a note section with "more" links. It reads very choppily, and will result in most readers simply not seeing the removed and footnoted information. Most of your recent changes and clarifications are great SM, but I truly disagree with this. I also still think pantsing and down-trou should be removed and have done so from eight-ball, but I won't protest their inclusion further here since the scope of a glossary is much more inclusive than an article on a specific game.---Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:35, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay. The "[more]" thing was just an experiment. Agree with you on the changes to eight-ball - if the action isn't on the table, it needn't be considered part of the game for that article's purposes. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 14:26, 2 September 2008 (UTC)  The experiment is now undone, but I think the lead may be too long. I did pare down the material a bit (too much?), but it's still a lot. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 14:47, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Transwiki
I think this ought to be transwikied to Wiktionary. Tubularbells1993 (talk) 17:49, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It already has. They have their own out of date, barely-sourced, broken-linked, unmaintained copy. See Wikt:Appendix:Glossary of pool, billiards and snooker If you're saying that this should be transwikied and removed from Wikipedia, that debate has already ocurred a few times with regard to glossaries in general, as well as to this one specifically, and the result was not to do so. I'm too tired right now to dig up links. I vehemently oppose such a course of action though.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:59, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No need to dig up links; see the box at top right of this talk page. Tubular, this issue really is long since settled. Yes, every glossary on WP should probably be transwikied to Wiktionary for Wiktionarian purposes, unless Wiktionary already has something similar that is better on that topic, and left as-is here at WP. And that is the end of it. Wiktionary has only a tiny handful of active editors compared to WP. Moving them to Wiktionary is simply off the table. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 03:49, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

All cross-references now use Template:Cuegloss2
I've upgraded all the internal cross-references to use Cuegloss2. It's simpler markup, has dotted underlining indicating a defined term, links to the in-page definition, has a tool-tip showing where it links, and doesn't bluelink, reducing the "sea of blue" that this and any other well-cross-referenced glossary ends up with; all the links are either section (A, B, C, etc.) links or are inter-article links, e.g. to nine-ball or snooker.

Took an hour or so of reading BBEdit's documentation on how it uses regular expressions, but once I figured it out, this search/replace took about 1.5 seconds:

Find:

Replace:

(In English that says: Look for a pattern bracketed with  and , consisting of two subpatterns divided by  , with the first consisting of at least two characters (any of: hyphens, alpha-numerics, spaces, quotation marks, commas, apostrophes and/or accute-accented e's), and the second consisting of at least one such character.  The replacement just means put the first subpattern as the first parameter, second as the second. There's surely a more concise way to do this first pattern than simply doubling it, but it was expedient. I miissed a few, like those continaing "(" and ")" and had to fix them manually, but no big deal.)

I'll next use that same sort of facility to convert this to the template-structured glossary format documented at MOS:GLOSS. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 06:32, 13 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Belated update: That template eventually got deleted as unneeded, and the code is now or  when the anchor (link target) and text to display differ. E.g.:  or, though   also works.  is a shortcut for .  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:56, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Converted to template-structured format, per MOS:GLOSS
I've finally gotten around to this. the glossary is now in the template-structured format instead of being laid-out with a heading for every entry. How this works is described at WP:Manual of Style/Glossaries. The format is a little more technical, but the results are better in a number of ways, including accessibility, and re-usability off-WP. The underlying structure used by the templates is the definition list HTML element and its sub-elements  (term) and  (definition), which were specifically designed for glossaries. The basic structure of an entry is:

A more complex example, with some variant spellings and multiple definitions:

— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 00:52, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Template:Cuegloss (and, here, Template:Cuegloss2) now easier to use
now only requires a second parameter if the content being linked to an entry is worded differently than the entry; case is no longer important:


 * Old usage:
 * New usage:

The second parameter can still be used like so, as it always has been:


 * Complex usage:

The version of the template is used inside the glossary itself, to reduce the "sea of blue" effect of intensive cross-referencing (it eliminates the blue color of the wikilink, and only uses the "defined term" dotted-underline style). The variant is also used to re-link a term to the definition when it reappears in a long article, without blue-linking it, just dotted-underlining it, and it also does not put a redundant  element around the term again.

— SMcCandlish   Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 00:52, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Belated update: The template eventually got deleted as unneeded, and the code is now  or  when the anchor (link target) and text to display differ. E.g.:  or, though   also works.  is a shortcut for .  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:57, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Transclusion limit
The page has breached the post-expand include size limit. The reference list and navbox at the bottom are now no longer visible. I assume it is this new template change that is causing this issue... could you consider trying to rectify it? — This, that, and the other (talk) 08:55, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Will look into it. I think just changing cuegloss2 to use the code from glossary link internal instead of transcluding it might fix this.  If not, then, well, things will be interesting. — SMcCandlish    Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 23:49, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yep, that fixed it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒〈°⌊°〉 Contribs. 23:58, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Update: no longer exists; we're just using  (shortcut to  directly.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:35, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Update Dec2016: The last part of list and references are no longer displaying correctly. Is it possible that this might be a transclusion limit issue again? -IPEdits (talk) 21:24, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Saved tens of thousands of characters
I created a shortcut for at, and using that 2000+ times in this article saved a LOT of characters. I can already feel the difference in page loading time, especially in editing mode. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:37, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Bar boxes that return the 8-ball?
Under WP:CUEGLOSS, an unsourced claim has been added: "Some coin-operated tables will also return the 8 ball, to allow it to be spotted if it is pocketed on the break." I've flagged this with, because I've played bar/pub pool in over 10 countries on three continents, but never seen this once. Where are these tables, and what company manufactures them? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:55, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I removed that line as it was not sourced.


 * I have personally, on more than one occasion, seen coin operated tables return an object ball down the shoot intended for the cue ball. Sometimes it was random and sometimes it was the same object ball that kept being returned. I expect that this was not the intention of the table operator and that these tables used size or weight to distinguish the cue ball from the object balls where the tolerance of the mechanism was such that the variation of the billiard ball dimensions caused this effect.


 * If a table operator intended for the 8-ball to be returned same as the cue ball, they could very easily take another cueball, paint it black, mark it with an 8 and replace the 8ball. I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere, has done this, however I know it's definitely not standard. Writing that returning the 8ball, same as cueball, is a possible use of the ball return mechanism would make for a little bit more complete definition but unfortunately I cannot find any reliable sources stating such so, although it is absolutely true, without a source it would just be my own 'original research' attesting. -IPedits (talk) 17:16, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * That's basically WP:OR nonsense, since no one paints pool balls.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:05, 7 December 2023 (UTC)