Template talk:Reporting mark

bolding of the mark?
Should the mark really be rendered in bold? This seems to violate the WP style guide. For example, see Sun (disambiguation), where its use for Sunset Railway (near the bottom) makes it the only item to appear in bold, which is in contradiction to WP:MOSDAB.--NapoliRoma (talk) 15:58, 20 April 2008 (UTC)


 * This template was originally created to present the reporting marks in a standard format in an article's first sentence. Since a majority of railroad companies in North America are referred to by their reporting mark (i.e. UP for Union Pacific Railroad, WP for Western Pacific Railroad, ATSF for Santa Fe Railroad, etc.), the template follows the convention that all the subject names in the lead section are bolded.  We could easily add a parameter to turn off the bolding for use elsewhere in an article (so we'd put something like , for example.  Slambo (Speak)  14:37, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Side effect: ghost link to argument
This is just a note to document the side effect of this template where, for example, causes its containing page to be listed at Special:WhatLinksHere/WAB. Mlaffs reported this to NE2 at User talk:NE2/Archive_18. NE2 replied "it's part of how the parserfunction #ifexist works". This side effect generates false positives that can confuse those attempting to disambiguate links to dab pages. -- Thinking of England (talk) 06:29, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The pages end up in Category:Temporary category and Category:Temporary category 2.
 * Is this temporary, or not? John Vandenberg (chat) 08:49, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * There's only one mainspace page in Category:Temporary category, and that's Rail transport in Puerto Rico. Note that it uses this template for PRMU, which would redirect to Puerto Rico Maritime Shipping Authority were there an article.
 * (By the way, I check Category:Temporary category every once in a while; it's an easy way to spot some edits that add bogus reporting marks.)
 * As for Category:Temporary category 2, I had forgotten about that. It no longer seems useful, so I've removed the code that generates it.
 * --NE2 09:59, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Would it be sensible to rename "Temporary category" to something a little more permanent? John Vandenberg (chat) 11:56, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * It's intended to be temporary until a redirect is created. --NE2 13:38, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * More than a year after this "temporary" category was created, its function has been moved to a category with a proper title, and Category:Temporary category is nominated for speedy deletion as an empty category. SchuminWeb (Talk) 14:44, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Edit request: Bolding
Could we please implement the 2008 suggestion above to add a parameter to enable the template to display its result not bold. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 21:11, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ I have added the parameter as suggested above and documented its use. Slambo (Speak) 15:04, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Change proposal: Option to suppress parentheses
Currently this template always adds parentheses around its text. This produces adjacent sets of parentheses in articles that include another parenthesized phrase, such as an abbreviation for the railroad. For example, Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway:


 * The Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (SP&S) ...

Or Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad:


 * The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (P&LE) ...

MOS:PAREN says that adjacent sets of parentheses should be avoided. In these cases, the parenthesized parts should be combined, like "(SP&S; reporting mark SPS)" or "(P&LE; reporting mark PLE)". But currently this is impossible to do while using the template, because it always includes its own parentheses.

How about a parameter similar to the existing  parameter, called   perhaps, that could be set to   to turn off the parentheses? Then these adjacent sets of parentheses could be fixed.

I'd be happy to make the change myself if there is consensus to do so. —Bkell (talk) 18:24, 21 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I have made the change. —Bkell (talk) 14:18, 29 March 2023 (UTC)