User:Retro/Templates/GA

Templates in Category:Wikipedia good articles templates.

Done

 * I've successfully sorted most of the pages in into subcategories. There are just a few remaining. I'll probably make it a Container category after I'm done.
 * I've moved all user templates to be exclusively in.

GA talk message boxes to Lua
This encompasses pages within Category:GA talk message boxes, particularly those with the  sortkey (i.e. those appearing in GAN subtemplates and GAR subtemplates).

Some snapshots of my progress are in Module:Sandbox/Retro/GA.

Here's some notes I have:


 * GA nominee and GAR/link have too many subtemplates. They should be reimplemented through a module. They uses repetitive and brittle ifexist instead of looping that could support an arbitrary number of pages. Thus the number of reviews that can be performed is artificially limited (though there is error message handling to account for this, which is clever). Maybe a problem down the line for most pages, but I'll bet it's been run into a few times by some unfortunate editor.
 * GAR/header - Is used by GAR/preload2. Is a victim of the aforementioned ifexist problem.
 * These redirects I created are somewhat questionable, but they are hopefully only temporary until I transition to a module:, , , , ,

My thoughts in this area have evolved, but I still think there's a bit of cleanup that should occur here.

Templates used by the GAN page

 * One related focused search

Categories

 * The main category name should be renamed from Category:Wikipedia good articles templates to Category:GA templates. But perhaps it should be Category:Good content templates (after all, there's Category:Good content user templates); this would expand the scope to good topic-related templates. But good topics are really more of a subset of featured topics than an extension of good articles. I think good topics should be removed entirely, though I'd probably feel differently once I'm trying to actually get a topic to good topic status.
 * One problem I'm noticing is that the talk namespace template category is often not distinguished from its main namespace; the namespace categories should distinguish these, because they often encompass different sets of templates. For example, one wouldn't see warnings in user namespace, they'd see them in the user talk namespace.
 * I'm starting to think the name "GA discussion templates" is overly broad, because most of these were intended for use in GAN, with few being used in GAR. But I'll have to have a look. (This isn't the bullet point that mentions this.) I made an error when I redirected GAN and GAR to discussion templates. Most of the discussion were GAN, anway; I don't think I've seen a GAR-specific one yet.
 * Category:GA user talk message templates should be renamed to the shorter Category:GA user talk messages (based on the format of Template messages/User talk namespace). I think the user talk message implies it's a template, and not every template-specific category currently has or needs to have the name "template" in it.
 * GAHybrid/item/doc transcluding in GAHybrid/doc is causing it to be categorized. Ideally, these would not be two separate templates, but the wonky categorization is fine for now until this gets fixed.
 * "talk message box" or "header template" The former is more specific, but the latter has less jargon. I ended up going with Category:GA talk message boxes to conform with Category:Talk message boxes, which is populated by tmbox.
 * There should really be a utility templates subcategory.

Miscellaneous
These are some notes I took while I was sorting Category:Wikipedia good articles templates. Some of them are redundant, and some of them need to be collected together in a more organized way, but this will work for now.


 * Nah, nothing special; they just only work when directly subsituted (i.e. not within a subtemplate on the page).
 * Special:Diff/897842771: TODO
 * Musing about GAN process templates:
 * Template:GANentry should be template-protected; it's another commonly used template, I believe. But this is a
 * [Doesn't quite make sense, but I wrote this note for another context independent of GA templates.]
 * is case in point; it has intricate template, but doesn't. Also, there's a lot of these that look similar. Do they use a metatemplate? Are they even necessary? In my opinion, they should be subst-only.
 * GAQFList
 * Template:GAReview, very interesting, look more into the talk; this should probably be protected; I would lean towards template protected. It's commonly used, even if it only has a few transclusions at a time. Maybe extended confirmed protection. At the very least, it should be semi-protected, because competence should be had before changes are made.
 * UnderReview: I think I was mistaken earlier; this is the one that's actually used.
 * GAOH: Weird... I'm pretty sure I didn't just imagine this template out of thin air...
 * Drafting text for GAN process templates. These also need their permission cleaned up and made consistent.
 * This page is used by GA bot to update the GAN page. Please be sure to communicate at talk before nominating
 * notify ... if you plan on nominating this page for deletion.
 * Maybe have some notice about editing, too.
 * GAN/Status doesn't need to be a separate template from GAReview (which should probably be renamed to GAN status; it also shouldn't default to review, but should default to "No status given"). GAN/Status does have a few transclusions, but they can be substituted.
 * GAN counter
 * This template is primarily intended for use by [GAN bot to ...]
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations&action=edit - View the templates that are used to see what templates are GAN process templates.
 * Template messages/User talk namespace: This has huge relevance to some of my templates, but it also appears to be overburdened; only people who already know what they're looking for can benefit from this. This page appears to be solely occupied by user warnings, but user warnings aren't the only type of template messages. There are also the XfD notices, specific to each type of XfD and there are barnstars (though I see the separate page that groups them. This RM is to see what the feelings are about the section organization here. I think both should have headers that are under a user warnings section.
 * There's no standard template for closing GA noms. There should be; one might try to edit a GA nom after it's done. I could do a database search for such edits, by looking for all noms with start to end edit deltas greater than a year. Actually, I think I saw a standard template for closing such discussion; it was somehow related to, if I recall.
 * https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/36274
 * I'm thinking about getting the barnstar on Barnstars, that's why I have all the use counting; the medal of merit actually has quite a few uses.
 * User talk:
 * -insource:"The Good Article Reviewer's Medal of Merit"
 * -insource:"The Wikipedia:Good articles Good Article Medal of Template:GAMedal Merit"
 * -insource:"The WP:GA Good Article Medal of Template:GAMedal Merit"
 * -insource:"The Good Article Medal of Merit"
 * insource:"Image:GA_Award.png"
 * -"The Good Article Reviewer's Medal of Merit" -"The Good Article Medal of Merit" -"The Speedy GA Reviewer's Barnstar" -"The Good Article Reviewer's Barnstar" insource:"Image:GA_Award.png"
 * 1; 2, 3: 3, 4: 8, 5: 1 "The Medal of Merit", 5: "Wiki Good Articles Medal", 5: "The Articles-Created-Are-Not-Necessarily-Good-Articles Medal of Merit"; czar's little customization.
 * "GAN Reviewer of the Month" image use
 * But I was later to learn the image use for the above searches, "Image:GA_Award.png", is not exclusive to one barnstar. And the barnstars seem specific to drives.
 * https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9011674#sitelinks-wikipedia
 * I could not figure out how to add the Spanish version of the template, es:Plantilla:ABaprobado (or any other language version of the template). But actually, it was deleted in favor of the article history template. Smart! I hope I can get traction for that here; it's something I'm really excited to do.
 * Old GAN backlog drive templates are only used in the archives. They should not be extant and working on archived backlog drives; instead, they should have been substituted directly at the end and deleted. Oh well. They could be used in future drives.
 * Template:GAN changes seems like it might be better as subst-only. It's used for a static calculation.

Old triaging
This needs to be reevaluated; many of my impressions have changed from my initial impressions, and some notes don't apply any more.

Triaging (incomplete). When I was triaging, I developed two mnemonics, +cat to add more categories, and use? when I wasn't sure about the use-case (but hadn't looked at the transclusions):
 * Category:Classification templates (unless noted, these aren't GA templates and should be removed from the category) There should be a category for . They shouldn't just be in the broad category "Classification templates". It seems like the documentation is overly long for some of these; all the user needs to know is that they only work in a table cell; it's pretty straightforward. This can be noted without an example. There could even be a standardized header template for noting that a template only works in table cells (I've seen this before, with Bad.)
 * FAC-Class
 * GA-Class: the one *actual* GA template.
 * Miscellaneous:
 * DGA-icon: There could be a category specifically for icons like this, a subcategory of Category:Wikipedia-specific image insertion templates.
 * FGAN: Interesting. In ,
 * GA inline: Use? +cat.
 * GA number: +cat; I wonder if there is systematic number templates or something like that. Definite keep.
 * GA pass: This is definitely historical (no recent uses). Most of its transclusions are indirectly linked and come from a single newsletter issue transcluded on talk pages, WikiProject National Basketball Association/Newsletter/Archives/3. This does make me wonder why it is isn't used, and whether there are any more popular alternatives.


 * is now a redirect. Replacing all occurrences with the redirect location would be disruptive and probably violate WP:COSMETICBOT in spirit. I do think if article assessment is more general than the 1.0 project, it should be linked that way.
 * Interesting, may be useful to me:
 * Here's a question: Should template sandboxes be categorized with the categories the parent template has? My answer is no, because they'll tend to get out of date with the parent template, and it's not useful for those exploring the category. I wonder if this cleanup could be done with a bot task (but obviously, consensus would have to be gotten first).
 * Why is the category named . Is there other good content besides articles?
 * GA user topicon, GA-userpage might be the kind of bullet I'm looking for.
 * Good article nominations/templates should put all of its templates into exclusively, which should be a subcategory of the GA category.

And the links on are also worth evaluating:
 * Suspect this is a widely used template, but I think there's a variant template that preserves history (I'll have to check it out). It's template protected. I like the prominence here.
 * 9581 transclusions
 * Bleh, bad first impression. Poorly designed, because there isn't a template namespace exception for the error message (as I assume there is with the related templates; I would be interested in investigating this further.) I believe I can edit this template though, because there is no template protected icon, in fact not being protected at all.
 * 1 transclusion, less than I expected. But I see, this is a convenience template that's meant to be substituted. That should be noted at the top (there are generic templates for noting that templates are only supposed to be substituted). I think given the circumstances, I would probably be in favor of keeping.

Generally, I like the prominence of the notice on the previous links, but the templates themselves might not be versatile enough. If memory serves, there are other templates that display similarly (perhaps already mentioned here; I will need to look closer).

I am also curious how bots currently use these templates. I suspect there are automated ways of adding these templates, but I don't know. (I suspect my original suspicions were wrong).

It also seems unwise to try to effect change before I've actually used these tools, but I think I can at least do some independent research and investigation.


 * (Outdated idea that I have determined is probably bad:) GA/GA-icon userboxes could be reported by bots (in a nice way, like sending talk page message informing the user. Even neater, all current/former GA could be checked for userspace links, and then the consistency improved. But actually, this is likely to be annoying and unnecessary because the original GA nominator is already supposed to get a notification if it went up for GA review. So they already should know if their GA has lost GA status.