User:Barbara (WVS)/sandbox/discussion

Template:Visiting scholars talk page template Template:Visiting scholars talk page template (edit · talk · history · links · logs · subpages · delete) This template is being added to the a lot of talk pages and cluttering them up. Was added to the hep C talk page here yet the only edit to the page appears to be the adding of a category.[1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:36, 31 July 2016 (UTC) delete not a helpful template(only clutter)...IMO--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 10:30, 31 July 2016 (UTC) Retain the template - The use of the template was discussed in detail with the Visiting Scholar supervisor at the University of Pittsburgh and with WikiEd and wasn't seen as a problem at the time. The Visiting Scholar is template is being used to track edits that are made through WikiEds Visiting Scholar program and appears on about 170 talk pages It is common and appropriate that WikiEd students, instructors and editors have placed the following template on at least 4000 talk pages: Graduation cap.png	This article is/was the subject of an educational assignment. other WikiEd templates include: Graduation cap.png	This article is/was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Graduation cap.png	Articles in this category were part of an educational assignment supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. You can assist the education program by place these articles in appropriate categories. Graduation cap.png	Articles in this category were part of an educational assignment supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. You can assist the education program by verifying that the articles are supported by appropriate sources. Graduation cap.png	Articles in this category were part of an educational assignment supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. You can assist the education program by adding illustrations to these articles. Graduation cap.png	Articles in this category were part of an educational assignment supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. You can assist the education program by ensuring that these articles comply with the sourcing requirements for medically-related articles. Graduation cap.png	Articles in this category were part of an educational assignment supported by the Wiki Education Foundation. You can assist the education program by ensuring that these articles are formatted in according with the Manual of Style. Wikipedia does not have guidelines on what is considered clutter, but there are guidelines here WP:Avoid template creep that help determine the usefulness of a template. I've listed them below with my own responses: Is there a more current way of presenting this information? Though the context of this guideline is referring to article templates, it still makes sense to apply this to talk page space and indeed there is not another way to present the information contained in the Visiting Scholar template. Do multiple templates on this article give the same information? There are no other templates that present the same information. Does this template duplicate information that's already in the article body? No. Do we have two or three templates where one would do? No. Do we really need this template at all? Yes, The Visiting Scholars template follows the precedent already in place by WikiEd to allow the identification of content added through the WikiEd Foundation. This template is needed to allow the librarians I've been training to see how and how much content can be added based on their library collections and content. It demonstrates how the WikiEd Visiting Scholar program has improved content and references in the encyclopedia. This template is also needed for my supervisor(s) at Pitt to have the ability to track my edits. It is not possible for them to sift through 6000 edit summaries to find out if I am editing the topics in which they have interest. Can I make the remaining templates less obtrusive? (Tongue in cheek answer) Perhaps it may not be the Visiting Scholar Template that is the major source of clutter.[2][3] (Serious answer) I can make the template smaller or I follow the examples of WikiEd's other templates. The template is useful in another way. It allows editors to know of the existence of a program that can give them access to resources that would make a tremendous difference in the quality of medical articles. The Very Best of Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 11:37, 31 July 2016 (UTC) Can you link to the discussion where it is "discussed in detail"? If you are wanting to track stuff would a hidden category do the same trick? Who was the visiting scholar who edited the hepatitis C article? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:41, 31 July 2016 (UTC) Weak delete I'm not sure the template is useful to anyone other than WikiEd. If it's to be retained, would a single WikiEd template serve an equivalent purpose? — soupvector (talk) 14:55, 31 July 2016 (UTC) delete not at all helpful - unnecessary clutter. If its only needed for University staff for checking purposes why cannot the user supply them with a list of pages edited? --Iztwoz (talk) 13:03, 1 August 2016 (UTC) Comments A difference between this template and the student assignment template is that if an article is made the subject of a student's assignment then that generally implies the student will make more substantial changes than the addition of a category. Although it should be noted that the person who added that category did make five subsequent edits to the article the next day, and are perhaps planning to make additional changes. Also it's hard to gauge from this one example whether addition of this template to an article's talkpage for minor edits is the norm or the exception. WP:TALK appears to be the only relevant guideline here. The guidelines generally appear to support deletion by repeatedly stressing the that purpose of article talkpages is for discussion on how to improve the article, and by specific bullets such as Comment on content, not on the contributor and Keep the layout clear. However, the relevance of all this is questionable since it appears to not have had the banner space at the top of articles in mind. Interestingly there is a guideline about talkpage templates: Wikipedia:Talk page templates, although it concerns itself only with the formatting of templates and not their inclusion. According to the guideline templates should have a "small form" which can be used if an article talkpage has become cluttered with templates. I've never seen these small templates though, and I'm not sure that they do much to reduce clutter or even if their usage is still possible with current wiki software. I think the purpose of increasing exposure of the program is a legitimate one, and that this should be addressed in this discussion. Perhaps other editors feel that talkpages are an inappropriate space to advertise wiki programs, or that the benefits of exposure are outweighed by increased clutter. Either way I feel someone who is asking for the template to be deleted should respond to this point raised by Barbara. M. A. Bruhn (talk) 04:32, 2 August 2016 (UTC) delete, unnecessary clutter. Frietjes (talk) 14:35, 2 August 2016 (UTC) Comments/Questions - I don't want to weigh in one way or the other regarding deletion, but I'd like to get a better handle on this discussion and add some context where I can. It seems like it might be a good idea to have a broader conversation (at e.g. a village pump) about programmatic banners on article talk pages. This has come up in conversation a few times (Bluerasberry is the name that first comes to mind), and my sense is that while the talk page guidelines make it clear that one should take care before introducing such a banner (or any banner), there do seem to be program banners that have existing support (the education program being the clearest example), and there is no bright line or clear set of best practices. Program-related talk page banners are not uncommon, even outside of the education program. Putting aside WikiProjects, Portals, and various "official" or "unofficial" on-wiki projects/collaborations, which I think are largely uncontroversial (WP LoCE, UFAIDnom, PUSRD-SA, SGCOTWP, Landscape, Incu-grad, etc.), there are also several banners for external projects (or projects which span on- and off-wiki) like WIR-AF 2016, GLAMARKive, UWRC October 12, 2015 editathon, WAM talk 2015, Wiki Loves Pride 2016 template, Wikipedia Connection, Editing Friday, and so on. I'm not linking to these to present an WP:OTHERSTUFF argument -- just trying to illustrate the scope of the broader question. When Wiki Ed first started working on the Visiting Scholars program last year, integrating the program into the Dashboard (which was developed to support classes) led to the automatic templating of project articles as though they were student articles. That template is dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment, and you can see an application thereof, tweaked for a Visiting Scholar, at Talk:William Howard Taft. Based on that concept, Barbara created this replacement, specific to her role, used in the same capacity. The Dashboard no longer templates articles by Visiting Scholars. We've talked about creating a different template in the future, but there's been no urgency and no firm plans to do so. If this [and, hopefully, subsequent threads] find the community would prefer not to have such a template, we would respect that. Wiki Ed does not use talk page templates to track anything. Tracking is handled off-wiki. I do not know if others are using it for tracking, but if there is no strong opposition to using a hidden category, I cannot think of a tracking function that a banner would serve that a hidden category would not be incapable of. That's not to say there's no reason to have a banner -- just that I can't think of a reason to have a banner vs. a category specifically for tracking purposes. Finally, I just wonder how much of these concerns would be solved by greater discretion in the template's application? Surely any template too liberally applied would be problematic. Perhaps there's a particular scenario when it would be appropriate? The Visiting Scholars program is increasingly emphasizing quality-based rather than quantity-based contributions, focusing on articles brought to B-class or higher. Would limiting such a template to that sort of evident improvement assuage some of the concerns here? Sorry for such a long set of comments. As an employee of Wiki Ed, I am an involved party and will not be !voting one way or the other. I hope to gain a better sense of what the community thinks about these sorts of templates and hope this can lead to a broader discussion. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:13, 3 August 2016 (UTC) Delete this and anything similar The template was created in September 2015. In October 2015 the creator of the template expressed intent to delete all instances of it by May 2016 in the discussion at Template_talk:Visiting_scholars_talk_page_template. This has always been a problematic template, and it never should have been widely used, but I do support short-term compromise to give people time to pursue other options. Templates such as these are used for these reasons: They make it easier to do tracking of Wikipedia articles by some methods They are imagined to make it easier for a new user with 0 edits to post to a talk page They communicate the a message similar to what goes on a talk page Templates such as these are a problem for these reasons: They occupy scarce real estate Typical Wikipedians do not know how to react to them, so they never get maintained If anyone gets one, then everyone wants one. Demand is very high and it creates inequalities when no one should have them but one group does. They are not standard talk page communication and do not invite replies or human interaction They always are featured prominently and never age away. Projects which are irrelevant keep the banners because they do not go away in typical archiving process. No one ever requests these. The standing request is for typical communication. Ryan (Wiki Ed) is correct that Wiki Ed banners have some existing support, but that support came about through a process other than typical community discussion and was more about a willingness to allow experiments. Other outreach projects, like Wikipedian in Residence projects which I think would be comparable, have not had access to the same privileges and have not been imagined as something official and outside the scope of what the community can discuss. The education program has been given extraordinary privileges to do all sorts of experiments on Wikipedia for years, and I am happy that these were done. As time goes on, I wish that acceptable practices could be codified into rules, and the rules could be made more public and developed, and that all projects on Wikipedia would follow the same rules. Ryan mentioned hidden categories, and yes those are used also. Here is the list of what is used: templates hidden categories hashtags in edit history keywords mixed in with conversation, like a hashtag There has never been community consensus to allow use of any of these things, and if community comment were requested, I do not think it would be granted. Especially since the advent of the Wiki Ed Dashboard and the pagepile tool, I think there is less need to post tracking tools in community space because other tools allow outside lists to be maintained. Because I have seen so many projects have the idea of using odd tags for tracking, and because none of them should do this, I drafted documentation for anyone to be able to do this in another way that is less invasive. It is very difficult to have straightforward conversations with organizations that have a requirement to post a tracker on something, so I am happy that there are some externally maintained alternatives which should provide all the benefits and more with no drawbacks. There could be more conversation about best practices, but in short, I anticipate that any conversation will end with a plan to delete these things. I would be delighted to have more conversation with anyone who cared about this. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:18, 3 August 2016 (UTC) Comment We used to have a template called Template:Maintained which an active editor of a page would put on the talk page so new editors would know who to ask questions to. Even that did not get community support and was deleted. I am okay with the wikiedu templates placed while the course is ongoing but IMO they should be removed afterwards. I have just trimmed these two.[4] I am happy to see hidden categories used as they are fairly non obstrusive. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:51, 3 August 2016 (UTC) Additional comment Another alternative could be to just make an ordinary talkpage comment with a standardized message instead of placing a banner. I feel this would mostly accomplish the same goals as a banner without being obtrusive and would automatically go away after a period of time via the archiving process while still being accessible for historical/record purposes. M. A. Bruhn (talk) 23:31, 3 August 2016 (UTC)