Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2009 October 22



Template:American politicians Robert Smith

 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was delete

orphan template, no longer needed after this edit and this edit. JHunterJ (talk) 16:37, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. Templates should not pose as regular article text, not even for disambiguation pages. --RL0919 (talk) 16:59, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't see why not, especially since they routinely do in articles (in the kosher sense, which recognizes that Dabs are not articles): The redlk Damiq-ilishu supposedly is linked to by almost 50 pages including about 30 in the main namespace. AFAICan figure out, the closest to a practical way to find how many of them have markup that links to it is to
 * remove the linking from the template, or rename the template, first (well, and be lucky enuf for the servers to catch up with one another or the right cache(s) to catch up)
 * (I may have tried that once; i don't advocate it.) The obvious and non-disruptive approach -- subtract the number of links the template has from the number of hits his bio has -- means you miss all the articles whose markup lks both to the template and explicitly to his bio (e.g., those in his father's and sons' bios). --Jerzy•t 07:41, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * In fact, on second thot, i'm ashamed to have taken that argument at face value for the time it took me respond above to it. It now occurs to me that many articles use As of in the middle of sentences. Or Update after, or mechanisms like Chinese name, or the popuptools-annoying birth date one i ran across this week -- and probably many others that don't occur to me. Which means RL's dictum either
 * makes a deceptively clear-sounding, but cryptic, distinction between "regular article text" and something else, or is a pipedream.
 * --Jerzy•t 07:41, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I must admit that I don't follow the relevance of some of the above, especially the part about the redlink to Damiq-ilishu, which seems to have absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. However, my comment about templates not posing as regular article text is not a "pipedream", it is from the guidelines on the template namespace: "Templates should not masquerade as article content in the main article namespace; instead, place the text directly into the article." Templates such as As of provide additional functions beyond simply inserting text into the article. This template does nothing except insert text. --RL0919 (talk) 14:06, 23 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Weak Keep. I think the logic i stated upon creation --
 * ... prevents Robert Smith (US politician) from redirecting to Robert Smith, without requiring duplicate maintenence [sic: s/b "maintenance"]
 * -- was sound and remains so, and that the edits JHJ cites were counterproductive. I think JHJ intends us to infer, from those edits, an (IMO unsound) argument whose intent may not be as obvious to others as to me. (I find it obvious, bcz i've recently used -- IIRC independently -- the same Rdr technique, out of resignation to edits such as theirs.) I infer they mean to say that a Rdr directed to a subsection of the Dab that has the same scope as the "Dab template" avoids the evils of dumping a user seeking an American politician named "Robert Smith" at the top of the Dab page, substantially as well as the template-based solution. That argument assumes that "United States" continues to be a heading, and to have its contents limited to American politicians, so it is valid only if the Dab has the protection (not required with the template technique) of a good-natured fairy or a stern guard (RC-patrolling is unlikely to suffice), to prevent refactoring of the Dab page from still producing the sort of result the template was intended to avoid. In the case of the aforementioned Rdr or the template scheme, that bad result is the user being tossed into a 75-entry Dab at an unsuitable point, after having clicked on a title, Robert Smith (US politician), for which only 9 articles are "in contention", when that title was either a reasonable guess at the desired bio's title, or a search-engine-provided link into (or within) WP. I saw myself obligated to respond at least for the record when notified, but i'm not suited to be the evangelist for either the particular case or the guideline it suggests. That makes it for me a hill not worth fighting for. There's nothing half-hearted about my opinion; rather, the "Weak Keep" is about my hope of prevailing and my now completed involvement. --Jerzy•t 07:41, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I infer the argument from WP:D: "When a more specific title is still ambiguous, but not enough so to call for double disambiguation, it should redirect back to the main disambiguation page (or a section of it)". Section linking always has the potential problem of disappearing targets, but can be addressed through anchor tags as well, so it's valid without any supernatural aid. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:49, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Template:Wisconsin Sports

 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was merge with Wisconsinsports

Severely outdated template that has seemingly been replace by another Template:Wisconsinsports. Since the two exist and the second one is actually continually updated, this one should be deleted. Once this one has been deleted, I proposed moving the second one to this name to keep it in line with the rest of the Sports Navboxes. Shootmaster 44 (talk) 10:24, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.