User talk:Willscrlt/Archives/2013-09

WP:Food
It would be appreciated if you joined in the conversation occurring at WT:Food regarding the layout and presentation of the project's main page. Northamerica1000(talk) 03:33, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: There is also a proposal at the page regarding the Sandbox 2 page, initiated by another editor. I've moved the discussion thread you contributed to directly below the first proposal. (It's possible you didn't see the first proposal, so sending you this message). Thanks for your input there. Northamerica1000(talk) 05:37, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Hello Will, just some quick background on this. I am trying to develop a new front page and I was trying to do an RfC on my proposal and north basically started this whole freak show. There has been an ongoing issue of him running rough shod over the page based upon a single discussion about a year ago. There have been several discussions about this issue, and he ignores them in favor of his preferred consensus. He has issue of WP:Own and WP:I don't like it. I Just wanted peoples input for a small time frame of a fortnight to a month and he just won't agree to allow this to happen. He has attempted to hijack this whole discussion and turn it to his favor. Basically he is trying to run the whole shebang. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:08, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
Northamerica1000(talk) 22:39, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

A gracious thanks
- I appreciate you stepping in and helping sir. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:21, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * You are welcome. However, to be perfectly clear, what I did was done to help the WikiProject, not either of the two key participants in the discussion. You both have made excellent strides in improving WP:F&D's main page over what it used to look like. I know, from the historical vantage point, that you did a lot (if not most) of the work getting it to look and function as well as it has up to this forking of the layouts. I think you for all the hard work you have done over the years! But, I'm all for picking the best from all the proposals, because that's what's best for the WikiProject and Wikipedia as a whole, not to mention all the Wikipedians and visitors to the site. :-) &mdash; Will scrlt ( “Talk” ) 07:27, 6 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The thing is, I am not making a proposal to change the main page any time soon. I was trying to seek input on ways to improve the design of the page I was working on through a Request for comment when then the whole dispute with North arose. I am working on complete redo of the whole set of project pages, and there is still a lot to do. The page is not ready for the limelight and won't be for a bit of time. Some of the the stuff you brought up I had an idea about already. The reason some of the stuff that is in North's design isn't in mine is because I have moved it to its own page, grouping related things together.


 * Here is how the site has been organized, based on the structure of WP:Military History:


 * My new main page design uses transclusions for each of the sections you see. The reason for this is that the original page was a huge mass of Wiki-code and HTML that could be easily messed up by an errant edit. I had simplified a great deal of the code by creating several new templates (Template:Scrolling window) and utilizing others (Template:Clickable button) to simplify the code, but it was still very complex. Also, by utilizing transclusions, you can quickly update the structure of the page to a new format, see (Sandbox 1). BTW, the Sandbox 1 is a design based on the French version of the WikiProject and The Beer WikiProject, but is incomplete. I gave up on that design.
 * All of the various tools, including the WikiProject tools, the project guidelines, article alerts, tools on sourcing, category trees and Wikimedia links are all on a page called Tools. This section is not in my new design as I am still working on a way to present them, either as a new section or as part of another. I am leaning towards a separate section.
 * The article to do list, the project tasks, collaboration center, stub expansion list, and list of articles needing citations are all included on a page called Open tasks. This section is included in the Contributing section.
 * The various member lists are all included on a page called Members. This page is linked in the Membership section.
 * There is a new Showcase of Featured Content Which still isn't in the Page Tabs template or in my new design. This is not included in my new design as I am still working on a way to present it.
 * The underlying structure of the pages has been reorganized in a more logical hierarchical structure that puts related pages in a tree under the related subject page. For instance the Participants, Assessment Task Force, and Welcome Squad pages are all under the Members page. The same goes for all of the other pages I have mentioned.


 * My main page design will eventually have all of these things included, but is incomplete at this time. I am also contemplating making each of the various boxes used on my design into a template to allow quick reformatting of any page on the fly or allow there usage on multiple pages without duplicating code every where. They would be located on a sub-page of WikiProject Food and drink/templates. I should also move the other templates I created there is well for consistency sake.


 * I am posting a version of this on the discussion page because it conveys the reasons for what I have done so far and wish to do. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 19:59, 6 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Wow! Excellent work, and a lot of effort. Yes, I think that posting this information to the group would be very helpful. If that was ever mentioned, then it has gotten lost in the shuffle. I've got to say that I am really hating the current main page. I can't find things on it that I know should be there. I just want fast, easy access to things, and I have to scroll and scroll, do a CTRL-F, and then I discover that it's not even on the page. I will still stand behind my arbitrary decision not to make any changes until mid-October, but that page is very broken and needs fixing. Your modular, template-driven method sounds very promising. I would recommend that you make the titles of each module/template overridable. It might be quite nice to include them in a user page or somewhere else in the project, and the name might need to be tweaked in the new location. Thanks for all your hard work. I know sometimes it feels like our work is done in a vacuum (at least until someone complains about it or messes things up in the middle of our work), but I have silently noticed some of the things you've been doing over the years, and it's really been a big boon to Wikipedia. :-) &mdash; Will scrlt ( “Talk” ) 20:15, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Update on the proposed main page (SB2)
I have made some additions. They're not complete but the layout is pretty much in place, but not set in stone as the form of the page can be easily changed by moving the transclusion links around. Please take a look... --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 23:34, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Food and Drink WikiProject newsletter September 2013
I made some changes, how does this look:

--Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 05:46, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The collapsable sections greatly help reduce the clutter. I ended up deleting the last one simply because it took up too much screen space and made me hate looking at my own talk page. I'd include a mention of the page design in there. I know that you guys have done a lot of work since the original discussion (and I need to make new screen caps to keep up), but I think it might help to energize the project members and prepare them to !vote on upcoming changes next month. What do you think? &mdash; Will  scrlt ( Talk | com | b:en | meta )  12:33, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Since I started the new design, North has actually modified his design to match mine in structure. At this point the design and content is pretty much identical, it is the layouts that are different. We are using the same manner of creating the page, transcluded sections, and each section uses the same set of templates to configure the page. When and if you do decide to launch another round of critiques, you could just link directly to those transclusions instead, or make a screen cap of the pages' original locations.


 * Me
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Welcome
 * WikiProject Food and drink/About
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Membership
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Contributing
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Content
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Related


 * Northamerica1000
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Info
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Contribute
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Articles
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Category tree
 * WikiProject Food and drink/Membership1


 * We have also made some tweaks to the existing main page, using some of my design cues and new templates up front to update the page. It will make the transition to the new design a bit easier when the time comes.


 * --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 18:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

New template
Quick brown fox

Hey Will, can you help me get this working? --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

✅ Whew! That was harder than it seems like it needed to be. At first, I tried Googling the problem, but nothing turned up. Including  or ' as a string without any text adjacent to it appears to be treated by the parser as ordinary, but extraneous, apostrophes. Therefore, it ignored them during output. This was verified by checking the XML Output in the Special:Expand templates page.

At first, I tried using raw HTML tags and, which worked fine, unless there was already bold or emphasis active elsewhere. I considered span tags, but there's no way to toggle the current value using them. I needed apostrophes to work.

Next, I searched for other templates that played around with bolding or italicizing text. Some used the techniques I just described, so they were no help. The others all used a technique like. It seemed that the only way anyone has gotten it to work in a template is to place it directly next to the text to be styled. So, I complicated the template in a very ugly way by adding nested #ifeq statements to check for yesno, noyes, yesyes, or nothing specified. Perfect? Not really. Maintaining it will be a bitch (mainly making sure that all four conditions are updated and no new errors added). That could be improved by making the actual output process its own subtemplate with the formatting as a wrapper. More than I wanted to do tonight.

I also made the text itself a replaceable parameter. After all, this could be used in other places where English is not the default language, or in situations where the editor wants to display a different set of characters. Is that beyond the original purpose of this template? Of course! But why not allow it if people want to? But then I tried including apostrophes inside of the text string, and things got fouled up again. Basically, the parser lost track of the apostrophe count. I had to add a new pair of nowiki tags between my apostrophes and the user's text. That was enough for the parser to keep track of things correctly.

I added examples--test cases really--for all of these options. It greatly over complicates the docs of such a simple template, but it is really helpful for troubleshooting. Oh! That reminds me. Your original template had another problem. You were using asterisks to display the output in bulleted format. However, your template had each check (em and strong) on separate lines, which the parser decided were line breaks. When it got to the *, it didn't see it as a special character, so no bulleted list was generated. Another pair of nowiki tags fixed that (at the expense of making the template look even more esoteric and seemingly needlessly complicated. If the linebreaks were removed, it would simplify the template's appearance, but it would be less readable and harder to maintain.

Fun little challenge, but the parser made this much more complicated than it should have been. Glad to have helped. &mdash; Will  scrlt ( Talk | com | b:en | meta )  12:27, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Another template issue
Hey will, here is another brain teaser for you:

I am looking to set up nested tabs, that is when you click on a tab on the the page tabs template, the new page has a second set of tabs right below it that joins into the box created by the page tabs template.

Seeing is better: WikiProject Food and drink/Templates

When You click on "Templates" on the main tab, I would like to have a new set of tabs to appear on the page below and have the line connect into the box created to the main Page tabs template. The second row also needs to default to the first page.

Templates used
 * WikiProject Food and drink/PageTabs2
 * WikiProject Food and drink/template tabs

Both of which are based on:
 * Template:Page tabs

Up for the challenge? --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 18:39, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Sure. Sounds interesting, but I am trying to finish two projects for classes due this week. I probably won't have any time until the weekend. &mdash; Will  scrlt ( Talk | com | b:en | meta )  21:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I understand, I have a huge reading assignment I have to do for my classes. --<span style="font-family:lucida sans, sans-serif;">Jeremy <small style="font-size:85%;">(blah blah • I did it!) 00:32, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

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