Template talk:Commons/doc

This is the talk-page for doc subpage: Template:Commons/doc.

Added generalized usage forms
03-May-09: I have added 4 lines (to the doc-page) to show the 4 main forms of usage, as follows:


 * Commons    - puts link-box with current page's name.
 * pagenam  - puts link-box connecting title pagenam.
 * pagenam - puts link-box showing the title shownam.
 * pagenam - floats link-box to the left side.

That style, for showing parameter formats, has been used for decades in technical documentation, outside of Wikipedia. The key principle to the clarity is to italicize the general parameters, such as "pagenam" and "shownam" which are chosen to NOT be English words, to emphasize their meta-level meaning. Hence, the italicized words are NOT what the users would be writing literally on a page, and they are NOT English-word directions such as "see above left". Any plain text (the un-italicized) is to be written as shown in each form of the template. Therefore, the user can easily see the need to specify "position=left" as in the following:
 * pagenam - floats link-box to the left side.

In contrast, the italicized parameter pagenam signifies a general parameter, so it is not to be considered as the literal 7-character string "pagenam" when using the template. The above-mentioned principles allow for precise definition of each form of usage, fostering the compact 4-line display to concisely describe usage of that template, as 4 different options. Even though the principles might seem quite trivial, the overall effect, for reader comprehension of the various options, can be a major breakthrough in communicating those options to the user. Compare, as a before-and-after survey, the number of users who realized the template had 4 forms of usage, before the forms were listed as 4 short lines. The compact 4-line format is analogous to a human-oriented variant of Backus Naur Form (BNF), for definitions in computer languages. Those compact lines, on the page, are then followed by the expanded wording as the rest of the doc-subpage. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Simplified wording of Location
For the reasons for this change to the wording of Template:Commons/doc, see Template talk:Commons category. Mitch Ames (talk) 12:57, 17 September 2015 (UTC)