Template talk:Infobox trail/Archive 1

Duller look
What happened to the green? Now these things look like every other infobox out there. Daniel Case 01:09, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Season is ambiguous
The season field is useful however I believe it is ambiguous i.e. you need to know the climate of an area to know when a season starts and ends. I suggest that "Months" be added as a field. It would be used to specify the months that the trail is the trail may be hiked, or is easily accessible. -- Patleahy 02:37, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to add a "Months" field. -- Patleahy 04:31, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Location field
The way this template is used it is not obvious to a reader from the existing fields where a trail actually is. I propose adding a new field Location which would be used to specify where in the world the trail is. For some trails such as the Wonderland Trail or Kepler Track this could be specific e.g.
 * Location Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, United States.
 * Location Fiordland National Park, Southland, New Zealand

For other trails such as the Pacific Crest Trail it would have to be more general e.g.
 * Location California, Oregon and Washington, United States

This field should be required. -- Patleahy 20:05, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I added the field. -- Patleahy (talk) 19:03, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Requested move
I propose this template be renamed Infobox Hiking trail. The new name more accurately describes the purpose of the template. The new name is more discoverable particularly by people who use a different term than trail. The change from plural to singular reflects the fact that this template is used to document a single trail and not a trail system. -- Patleahy (talk) 05:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC)


 * The template is an Infobox. It should have a name similar to the other infoboxes: e.g. Template:Infobox Hiking trail --Ozhiker 14:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Good point. I changed the proposal above from Hiking trail to Infobox Hiking trail. Thanks Patleahy (talk) 16:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC).


 * I did the move. I'm going to wait a couple of days in case there are any last minute objections before I change all existing articles to use the new name. -- Patleahy (talk) 22:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

extra field request: status
In the UK, some trails are officially designated as National Trails (England and Wales) or Long Distance Routes (Scotland). It would be useful to have a field in the infobox for categories like this, which presumably exist elsewhere too (GR in France, European long-distance paths). PamD 10:17, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I can add this. What should it be called? I was thinking of 'Designation' but perhaps there is a name which is more obvious to readers. Other examples include New Zealand Great Walks and National Historic Trails in the United States.-- Patleahy (talk) 17:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Infobox Mountain has "listing" (as in Munros), which might work; I'd thought of "status"; "designation" would probably work OK. Needs to be something which makes sense to editors and readers worldwide! PamD 17:33, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I added a new field "Designation". Both the articles on UK National Trails and U.S. National Scenic Trails use the word designation so I decided to use that. I thought listing was more a statically thing than an official recognition. See an example here. -- PatLeahy (talk) 19:22, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Now included in South West Coast Path. PamD 21:45, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Trailheads vs. start/end points
I'm wondering if the "Trailheads" part of the infobox should be reworded. . .it's too deceptive. What you're really talking about here are terminus locations, not trailheads. For instance, the Appalachian Trail has thousands of trailheads, not just the (so called) trailheads on Springer Mountain and Mount Katahdin. Furthering the confusion here is the idea that "trailhead" means "a place to park my car" to many hikers. (The idea of the summit of Mount Katahdin as a "trailhead" seems preposterous). Recommend changing it back to "start/end points." --Pgagnon999 (talk) 15:13, 7 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Start/end points is more familiar in the UK, so I'd welcome that change. I wonder if there should also be a "circular centred on..." option, for trails which form a continuous loop? PamD (talk) 16:08, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Copied from the Wiki:hiking project talk. --Pgagnon999 (talk) 23:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

A way to manage image size
Is there a way to manage the size of the image in the infobox? Geobox has one; this could use one too. --Pgagnon999 (talk) 03:54, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Autoconversion
I've added autoconversion using convinfobox. J IM ptalk·cont 15:51, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Example of what I'm getting at:
 * Wapack Trail‎
 * South Downs Way‎
 * Peddars Way‎‎
 * West Highland Way‎
 * Glyndŵr's Way‎
 * Appalachian Trail‎‎

J IM ptalk·cont 16:26, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Describing Elevation Gain and Loss
I suggest the field ElevGainAndLoss be added and the field ElevChange be deprecated.

The new field can be used to express gain and possibility loss. This could be used twice if the trail is out and back. E.g.:
 * Elevation Change 300 m gain
 * Elevation Change 150 m loss
 * Elevation Change 300 m gain southbound
 * Elevation Change 600 m gain in; 200 m out
 * Elevation Change 500 m gain; 300 m loss

The existing ElevChange field would be deprecated. It can't be simply converted to new field. Where both ElevGainAndLoss and ElevChange are specified only ElevGainAndLoss will be used.

I suggest this for two reasons:
 * 1) Gain and loss provides much more information and a glance than simply change without an indication of direction.
 * 2) It is not obvious to readers who only look at the articles and don't examine the template that the value expressed is the sum of the gains and losses, they may just assume that the value is the elevation gain. I have even seen editors make this assumption. This is an easy assumption to make since many hiking books express gain, not change.

I also suggest that we recommend that this field be expressed in meters or feet. People think of elevation in those units, not kilometers and miles.

Let me know what you think. -- Patleahy (talk) 18:56, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I’m going to make this change. I’m assuming silence means that this is uncontroversial and not just that it has not support. -- Patleahy (talk) 21:15, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I made the change. I decided to use the label Elevation Gain/Loss to avoid any confusion with the existing term Elevation Change. -- Patleahy (talk) 22:55, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Proposed infobox
I proposed a new infobox on Wikiproject History for historical trails and roads (i.e. truly historical like the Appian Way or the Chisolm Trail; not simply modern highways that have been decommissioned or hiking trails that are still in use). If you have a thought on this please comment there.

--Mcorazao (talk) 21:04, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Adding embed option
Are there any objections to my adding an embed option patterned after Infobox NRHP? Example: Fayette Historic State Park. I have created it in the sand box with testcases.

The only changes required were adding a line at the top and modifying the next line ([ diff]). The sandbox rules require the removal of the tags for the sandbox only.

An example of where this could be used is here Kal-Haven Trail. --Bamyers99 (talk) 22:07, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Support. I think this would be a great way to easily add maps and inline coordinates to hiking trails. --Gyrobo (talk) 22:48, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Just added a Title parameter to override the trail Name parameter in the heading. This is for yes and will preserve the Name parameter for page scrappers that may be looking for it in this templare. Entering "no" for the Title will suppress the heading.

Also added a Start/End Points Label parameter to override the default Trailheads label. --Bamyers99 (talk) 22:01, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Can you add a sample that includes both a map with map caption and image with image caption? --Gyrobo (talk) 22:57, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, I'm not too keen on replacing "trailheads" with "end points". Let's try to keep the terminology consistent. Also, can you resize the embedded box so that it has the same width as the container? The indentation is off for the contained data. --Gyrobo (talk) 23:00, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback Gyrobo. I added an image to one of the test cases. Removed the Start/End Points Label parameter. Fixed the column alignment. The extra vertical space between the Website and the Length in the headingless testcase is caused by margins around the url which I can't control. --Bamyers99 (talk) 02:30, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That looks really good. I have no objections at all to this. --Gyrobo (talk) 02:48, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

This feature is now live and documented. --Bamyers99 (talk) 04:41, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Breaking...
This template is currently breaking in a weird manner: adding fjlkdj;' after each time it's on a page. I'm not quite sure why; anyone want to figure out why? Thanks! Pi.1415926535 (talk) 05:11, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I can't find an example of it breaking. Looked at the testcases, Wonderland Trail, Kal-Haven Trail. Do you have an example? Maybe some other included template was temporarily broken. Bamyers99 (talk) 15:31, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed. It was a good-faith test edit on !) as seen here. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 18:27, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Convert to using common infobox template
Fellow editors. I propose converting this infobox to use the common infobox template that is underneath many other infoboxes in WP. I've already coded it up: the new infobox is at Infobox hiking trail/main, with a temporary translation layer at Infobox hiking trail/sandbox.

My motivation for this is maintainability: the template code in Infobox hiking trail/main is a lot simpler and easier to change than the existing code in Infobox hiking trail. While I was doing the conversion, I made the following changes to the template:
 * 1) Change the background color from DarkGray to Silver (adding more contrast, making it easier to read).
 * 2) Added section headers (e.g., "Elevation" and "Hiking details") to make the infobox easier to read.
 * 3) Converted the parameters to be lower case with underscores, which matches other infobox parameters. The temporary translation layer will allow backwards compatibility: a simple AWB run can easily convert the existing infobox instances to the new parameters.

You can see a before/after comparison at Infobox hiking trail/testcases.

Questions? Comments? Objections? —hike395 (talk) 15:47, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
 * No comments, so I will move the sandbox to the main template. —hike395 (talk) 14:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Visible Newline
Someone should remove the newline in front of the, there is a visible effect in articles. --79.223.28.241 (talk) 00:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * ✅ Thanks! —hike395 (talk) 03:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Coordinates
Can we please amend the infobox to accept the coordinates of the start and end of the trail? --Bermicourt (talk) 08:14, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I support your goal of adding coordinates to the infobox. However, I question whether start/end are well defined for all trails. Some (like the John Muir Trail) go from trailhead to trailhead, and can be hiked from either end. Others (like the Wonderland Trail) are circular and have multiple trailheads. In general, how do editors choose start and end? Which coordinates get displayed in the title? —hike395 (talk) 02:08, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Your points are well made. I've had a look at German Wikipedia and they have at least 3 infobox options: display both start and finish points (e.g. de:Great Glen Way), display a single start/finish point for circular routes (e.g. de:Chorbrünnel-Rundweg) or leave them out entirely. And they don't display any coordinates in the title, only the infobox. I don't know how they decide which end is the "start", although in the case of the Great Glen Way, the text makes clear it can be walked in both directions, but the recommended start is at Fort William. I think we should at least have the options available. There are many trails that do have clearly defined end points and circular trails that have an obvious start/finish (e.g. the one car park en route where all the info boards are). --Bermicourt (talk) 07:55, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

I came to ask much the same question as the previous question almost two years ago. I was actually going to phrase it as "What is the preferred way of including coordinates in the infobox?" What I have done for a couple now is to put the coordinates straight after the trailhead name, inline and picked one of them to be inline,title. Is this acceptable? I found it renders better (using high-precision coordinates) to make the trailheads a list by putting each one on a line starting with * instead of separating them with. --Scott Davis Talk 01:59, 17 February 2016 (UTC)