User talk:PEJL/Template:Proreview

Professional review dates

 * Moved from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums by linca  linca  06:40, 19 August 2007 (UTC).


 * What if we do something like an expansion template where the editor notes things like this:

Which would be yeilded (once we write the script to do this) by this:
 * I know this will take up a lot of space in the editing region, but in the viewer's article space, it'd seem much more streamlined than now. What do you think? I haven't fixed the initial script for the "show" template. It works, but only barely, but if we do this, I can make sure I get it right. -- linca linca  15:54, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Would an expanding table be better than footnotes? I think either one might work well. I often prefer to replace the review link in the infobox with a link to a footnote that appears in the "references" or "notes and sources" section. Since some of the reviews are also sources of information for the article this avoids duplicating links to the same article. It also allows one to treat paper sources in the same way as the online ones. (here is an example]) I think it is good to offer as much infromation as possible on our sources. What is free and easy to link to on the internet today may or may not be there tomorrow. Listing reviews as references may also address some of the complaints that our album articles frquently have no sources. -MrFizyx 16:23, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * It would only be more streamlined for readers if we hide the rating, which I don't think we should. A reader that wishes to see all the ratings should not have to un-hide a dozen sections to do so. So:
 * {| class="wikitable" style="width:20em"




 * }
 * In practice many reviews wouldn't include the author name or publication date, which would make the collapsing quite redundant in those cases. --PEJL 16:49, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the author's name is available more often than not--perhaps you're saying people just won't bother adding them. One should also (at least be able to) include the issue and page number of the magazine and possibly the title of the article as well. -MrFizyx 18:52, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'm saying many editors wouldn't bother adding anything but the source name, rating and the external link (like they currently don't bother including dates). Agree to everything else. --PEJL 09:59, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, having the star rating by the side is fine for me. All of the parametres could be per requiem, so if a person doesn't have a rating, an external link, an author, etc etc, one could still add the template to indicate the review. Perhaps have an option to take a quote? Maybe we'd make it essential to provide a web-reference when providing a quote, for verifiability, but do you guys think this would work? As an after/further thought, maybe we should work it like the singles template, in that you'd have:


 * So you'd merge all of the usage into the one. This has the issue of having to be limited, so we'd need to create it either very big with allowing up to, say, 50 articles, or start to enforce a maximum cap on how many professional reviews can be listed in the infobox (I think 15 is more than enough, in 99% of cases). Can we get a bot to check the # of professional reviews in each page? I not aware of any article with more than about 20 or so, but if there are some with tons, then we'd have to consider that.
 * What do you guys think, though? I agree in a way about the referencing, btw, but the regular viweer is not coming to wikipedia to "check their sources", but with this sort of thing, they're going to want to read some of the reviews. If we hide the reviews in a reference, it means the viewer/reader may not understand taht there's an external link at the bottom of the page in a footnote. In this case only, I believe it's appropriate to have all the external links directly accessible.
 * Actually, in saying that, this template could be written to use the information as a reference as well as provide the information in the way that it's directly accessible. How about that? We could add the variable "1refname" and "2 refname" etc and use that to allow multiple uses of the same reference, also. It would also mean needing to add the "1accessed" variable also, (to note the retrieved date), but that's not a tough one either (modified above to reflect this). Rethinking it, it may not be essential to name the ref, because the name could simply be the name of the publisher of the ref (i.e. "Rolling Stone" from above). -- linca linca  00:26, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Another option is to always make the link text "link" (not a date) and always include references which contain the date, author, and other info, possibly including the external link again, when any such additional info (other than the external link) is available. That makes it just as easy for readers to get to the external review as it is now (one click, as opposed to two), uses the standard reference format (for consistency with other references), is very compact, and allows for a more gradual implementation (still using bulleted lists, as opposed to collapsible tables). If we feel that the symbol to the right of the external links interferes with the reference we can wrap the entire professional reviews section in  to hide those symbols, as illustrated in the second example below: [...] ==References==
 * Rolling Stone link
 * Rolling Stone link
 * Unexpanding with ref (duplicate source, URL)
 * Expanding with ref (duplicate source, URL, reviewer, publication date, possibly issue number and page number)
 * Another problem is that the references don't work backwards unless the corresponding section has already been expanded. Try clicking on the "^" next to Stephen Thomas Erlewine.
 * --PEJL 07:49, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I know this might make the view little bit more dense again, but what if the reference is embedded into the unexpanded view, to avoid the "^" placeholder link issue you mentioned.
 * So instead of this:
 * I know this might make the view little bit more dense again, but what if the reference is embedded into the unexpanded view, to avoid the "^" placeholder link issue you mentioned.
 * So instead of this:


 * ...You'd have this:

How about that? Again, I know we're trying to avoid clutter, but this amends this issue we have. (If we go for this, I'll have to go through the trouble of re-formatting Time on Earth, but that's to be expected). So are we going to go for this, then? Oh, and we'd need to fix the lineheight with this way, too, but that's able to be attended later. linca linca  09:00, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

21 August

 * If it weren't for the template-ref bug we could generate the entire review using a single template. Now we either have to use an outer template like show but generate the content for reviews manually (like in your examples using show above (but possibly using a second template for the contents of ), or use three templates, like this:


 * Reviews    =
 * It's either too much code or too much complexity (too many ways to screw up, too difficult to learn). Now if we were to drop the references, this would be much more straightforward... --PEJL 10:07, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
 * What about if we used a subst option? Like, we substitute a re-using of the info and place ref tags around it when adding to the page? By this, I mean an embedded subst. Something like this:

All Music Guide  Review by Publication date: [ External link] yeilding this:

Meanwhile, we'd have to write the one for proreviewref

In the first one there, I've included the whole script that I wrote for the "show" template originally, except that I've pre-aligned it to the left. I'm going to try and see if this works, but I thought I'd throw the code in here and see if you think it's going to work. -- linca linca  11:20, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Got it
So, after trying my hardest, I figure what's going to be best is if we substitute the template. I've done it and it works, but I don't know how to use the switch and if variables in the templates (not my bag, baby) but this only presents an issue with future users, but on the plus side, it works. We could even embed the three templates as you suggested, because substitution compensates for that. It's not perfect, but it gets us past this. Look here: User:Lincalinca/test region. I've substitued the info in.

What do you think? Think this is the path to take, or try and work around with something a bit simpler?-- linca linca  11:39, 21 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, substing is a good idea. However, we need to make it understandable how to edit reviews after they've been added, and we don't want to expose the raw code like, partly because we don't want to paint ourselves into a corner by hardcoding such raw code into articles (in case the class names are no longer supported in the future, for example). So even with substing I think we'll want the final result to be templates. So if we want an expanding box, the best we can expect to end up with is something like:


 * Reviews    =


 * which would be substituted into:


 * Reviews    =
 * That's the best I think we can end up with, if we are to use an expanding box with a ref in the middle. I'm not sure this is good enough. The existing format with an added ref is just so much simpler, and completely backwards-compatible:

--PEJL 15:43, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Reviews    =
 * All Music Guide link

What if...
I just thought of something, which kind of turns the final outcome on its head, but what if we put the references first? I don't know if the show template/formatting allows this, but it may. I'm suggesting this before sandboxing, so I'm going to try here and see if it works. I'll try and jig somethig now. linca linca  04:32, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Take 2:

All Music Guide  Review by Publication date: [ External link] Something like this maybe? I'll try and put it into action and see if it works/is buggy etc. linca  linca  04:46, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I don't understand the code, but that may be possible. We could possibly use CSS absolute positioning to move the ref, even if is first or last in the code (either would work, and last would probably be better, for non-CSS browsers). --PEJL 05:08, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Breaking Template:Review-Christgau
Another thing that just occurred to me is that if we go down this road, we'd break Review-Christgau, if we want such reviews to be able to use refs.

BTW, I'm inserting this into a new section, but for some reason MediaWiki makes unrelated changes to the navHead section above. That is unintentional on my part. --PEJL 13:40, 22 August 2007 (UTC)