Template talk:Vague

Wikiproject Inline templates proposed
WikiProject Council/Proposals. I've been meaning to do this for a while. &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 16:31, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

More mouseover problems
Wen I'm using MSIE, mouseoer doesn't seem to work, instead it creates a block of text in the article. Very ugly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:14, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Mouseover sometimes fails
Mention the cases when the mouseover part will not show the message one intends, and instead just e.g., "see the sytle manual". Jidanni 18:48, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Huh? That appears to be phrased as a directive to change the documenation, but I can't make heads or tails of what you've said here.  I've never seen this or any other template say "see the style manual". —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 19:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm also not sure what this is referring to. This template is unlike most of the others of this sort in that it allows an optional parameter to add descriptive text in the popup after the default, "You can help --". That text doesn't make alot of sense if there is nothing in the parameter to go after it. Maybe that's the issue? --CBD 00:14, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds plausible, and warrants further testing. I can definitely confirm that the tooltip of the rendered example in the documentation does not work (in Safari browser under MacOS X). —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 05:47, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, can you be more specific? The template results appear on Template:Vague twice. The top instance is the code itself and thus has no parameter value set and, for me, shows a tooltip of "You can help --". The lower instance has the parameter set and shows "You can help -- optional message to be displayed on mouseover". Are you getting something different? If so then it would seem to be a browser specific problem. If not, then those results are how the template was always designed to function (even before implementation of 'fix-inline'). --CBD 14:04, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I mean the example in the "Usage" section; the template itself at the top isn't an "example in the documentation". :-) I get the "Wikipedia:Manual of Style" tooltip that the Mediawiki software autoassigns to the links, in both cases.  I think that something is "wrong" with the fix or fix-inline code, or rather that it is not robust enough in some small way to anticipate and handle what vague is doing.  While this does seem to have some sort of browser-specific nature, it is still something to do with a) exactly how this template's code is doing the tooltip, and fix/fix-inline's parsing of what this template is doing, because the issue does not arise with fact or any of the other inline templates that use fix/fix-inline tooltip feature in the "normal" way.  Logic tells me that the unusual thing that vague is doing is resulting in rendered code that, unlike the "normal" fact-style usage's output, is parseable properly by some browsers but not by others.  It will probably take some "View source" examination of the differences between the output. I can't think of any other explanation.  My further suspicion is that the WikiMedia code auto-tooltips regardless, and that for whatever reason this template's tooltip output is being overridden by MediWiki's default tooltip, and that this is not happening with fact etc.  I can't presently think of a reason why that would happen. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 17:31, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * The template tooltip appears as you hover over the brackets; the link has its own tooltip that overrides the title of the box. Yecril 21:09, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is the behavior I experience. Who is going to hover over the brackets though? The link tooltip should be overridden. Devourer09  ( t · c ) 21:37, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

When I mouseover the example, I get "Wikipedia:Manual of Style", using both IE7 and Firefox (both with Windows XP). In other words, it gives the link instead of the title. Eric Kvaalen (talk) 14:25, 17 August 2008 (UTC)


 * yes. this is a problem with the current implementation of HTML itself, I think.  the 'TITLE' attribute (which specifies the tooltip on HTML elements) is so far as I can tell not inheritable, so that when you have a block within a block it can only recognize the inner one.  in this case, the 'vague' tag is rendered as follows:
 * where the title element of the span block (created by the vague template) is overridden by the title element of the anchor block (created by mediawiki itself when it expands the link), and I can't see any easy or immediate way to overcome that. -- Ludwigs 2  00:02, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * where the title element of the span block (created by the vague template) is overridden by the title element of the anchor block (created by mediawiki itself when it expands the link), and I can't see any easy or immediate way to overcome that. -- Ludwigs 2  00:02, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge tag seen on every use of template
Looks awful and confusing as often cuts lines up mid-sentence. Anything that can be done? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.105.181.49 (talk) 17:25, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Dumb, non sequitur link in template
The documentation of this template says that "This template should be used in articles where a sentence may be vague, ambiguous, or unspecific."

Yet if you click on the link created in an article using this template, that link takes you to Manual of Style which deals only with "Use accurate measurements whenever possible."

That's nonsense. It does not follow. There are oodles and oodles of ways in which a sentence may be "vague, ambiguous, or unspecific" which have nothing whatsoever to do with accurate measurements. Not only that, but inaccurate measurements are often not a vagueness issue. And when measurements are the issue, it is most often the identification of a particular unit of measure which can have several different meanings that is the problem (e.g., "tons", "gallons"), something not covered in the MoS link. Those measurements may well be very "accurate", but they need to be specifically identified.

But the vagueness can have to do with the meanings of lots of terminology not dealing with measurements, and it can deal with the ambiguous punctuation of the sentence and various other things. Those are covered in the statement in this template's documentation, and they should be. But the link the template creates is bullshit. Gene Nygaard (talk) 04:39, 28 December 2009 (UTC)


 * I've changed it to a plain link to the Manual of Style, and added a short blurb there about writing clarity. might do better later if I think about it.  -- Ludwigs 2  05:46, 28 December 2009 (UTC)


 * As it turns out, there's a Vagueness... so, I've changed the link to that. — V = IR (Talk&thinsp;&bull;&thinsp;Contribs) 00:38, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Allow marking the exact text that is vague
By analogy with similar templates, should this template use Fix-span instead of Fix, so the exact text being objected to can be set off visually, as is possible with, say, Template:Clarify (through the text parameter) and Template:According to whom (through the first unnamed parameter, a.k.a. 1)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by dcljr (talk • contribs) 26 November 2019 (UTC)
 * The correct answer, BTW, is "Yes". - dcljr (talk) 12:39, 6 February 2020 (UTC)