Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2016 March 16



Inappropriate "warning" templates about honorifics

 * 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).

The result of the discussion was delete. ~ RobTalk 05:50, 24 March 2016 (UTC) Maybe speediable per T2. Not complying with persnickety MoS is not "vandalism" or anything else people would receive WP:UWT warnings for; the notion that people can be blocked for adding "HRH" or "OBE" to someone's name in an article is a misrepresentation of policy. I'm not sure anyone's been using these in years; Styles3 has been broken since September 2012‎ (you can't tell when the TfD template is at the top, but without it, Style3 displays as a bordered code markup box, unlike any other uw-* templates). The broader implication these templates is that creating UWT templates for every minor MoS nitpick would result in about a thousand of these things. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:38, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Styles2
 * Styles3
 * Styles4


 * Delete all per well-argued nomination. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:18, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete MoS non-compliance is not vandalism. Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:50, 19 March 2016 (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).

Template:Unicode

 * 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).

The result of the discussion was Relisting here. ~ RobTalk 05:45, 24 March 2016 (UTC) This template was used as a work-around for display of Unicode characters in Internet Explorer 6. Discussion on the talk page concluded this isn't useful any more nowadays. This template should be substituted before deletion. —Ruud 21:07, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Unicode


 * Delete after substing. Just to note: IE6 was not the problem, it was XP (affecting also Chrome). With MS having dropped support two years ago, there is no reason to maintain this.  21:12, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * MS still support corporate installations of XP. Our article states "As of January 2016, Windows XP desktop market share is 8% (and market share is higher in e.g. China at 26%, India; Asia in general and Africa), making it the fifth most popular after Windows 8.1 and OS X (though some statistics rank it second after Windows 7".  Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Being the English Language Wikipedia, I don't quite get why China's share is so important here. I think reader share is more significant.  19:05, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep per my reply to Edokter. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:57, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Could you clarify which browsers on XP are affected. IIRC Firefox has never needed this hack, not even on XP. Do the most recent versions of IE and Chrome that run on XP need this?
 * Even if those browsers need this hack, then it's important to consider that:
 * Keeping this template around is still going to be pretty useless, as no one is bothering to add it to any articles anymore.
 * Chrome support for XP will end April 2016. So if you're still running XP with anything other than Firefox, then having a few Unicode character not showing up is going to be the least of your concerns.
 * —Ruud 09:41, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * , Firefox seems to be the only one handling all unicode correctly, as long as the proper fonts are available. IE, Chrome and Opera all rely on Windows for proper Unicode support, and are more prone to fail.  15:01, 19 March 2016 (UTC)


 *  Weak keep, though I am on XP, my !vote is more about using a documented template rather than raw html markup —PC-XT+ 02:21, 19 March 2016 (UTC) 02:24, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Oh, are you proposing to remove the class, (and HTML wrapper,) as well? In that case, there would be no raw HTML concern —PC-XT+ 02:36, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes this is about completely removing this hack, so there is not going to be any raw HTML inserted instead of this template. —Ruud 09:41, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Alright. I edited my !vote. This workaround is losing its need as time goes on. It has almost been de facto deprecated by disuse. There are still "many" of us XP users. (I don't use it exclusively, but prefer it for many things. I tend to collect and use old OSes, as my name implies, but I know some who use it almost exclusively.) As argued, most of us tend to have more important concerns than Unicode characters displaying properly. If we do care, we tend to use Firefox or, somewhat rarely, other local workarounds, because unlike wikis, most sites don't let us install such things on them. It is most often just a minor annoyance, now. I still lean towards keep, though probably not for long. Do we have any statistics on what browsers are used by XP visitors? If most are using Firefox, it would strengthen the deletion argument. —PC-XT+ 21:55, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * The relevant group is Windows XP users that haven't switched to an alternative browser (under the assumption that people that were smart enough to switch to Chrome are also smart enough to switch to Firefox next month). In June 2015 the usage share on Wikimedia sites of MSIE 6.0 was 0.25%, of MSIE 7.0 was 0.63%, and of MSIE 8.0 was 1.28% . But keep in mind that the share for IE7 likely includes a lot of Vista users, and the share for IE8 a lot of Win7 users. This is also for all Wikimedia sites; a disproportional percentage of the those requests may well go to projects other than the the English Wikipedia (as XP is disproportionately popular in Asia as Andy pointed out above). —Ruud 22:24, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * And by the way, this template is (was) only needed for more exotic Unicode characters. Latin letters with common diacritics, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese should all be fine without it. —Ruud 23:08, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmm... That's interesting data, but I'll need to think about it. I'm not sure someone who is still using XP but not using IE would necessarily use Firefox, though if they cared about this issue, they would be more likely to. Some just don't seem to get along with Firefox. Many XP users change the user agent string, especially for older browser versions, to something more common. If they pretend to be a different OS, however, these corrections would be disabled, anyway. Wikimedia sites get a lot of traffic, so a small percentage can still be a lot. The HTML page percentage is 1.75% for the two older browser versions. I expect these include more annonymous usage. I certainly don't mind removing this from any characters that don't need to use it. I might go through some transclusions to see if they are needed, myself... —PC-XT+ 07:34, 20 March 2016 (UTC) 08:00, 20 March 2016 (UTC) Something else to think about... inaccessibility creep: Wikipedia is becoming harder for older browsers to visit successfully, anyway. I don't think I can even load Wikipedia in IE8-, possably due to pushing a kind of secure connection to anonymous users that was not used when the browsers were made. ("Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage") Many other secure sites have that issue, since the older security was found to be flawed. —PC-XT+ 08:00, 20 March 2016 (UTC)
 * That's actually a good point. Those browsers statistics are from before we required HTTPS. I think IE6 users won't be able to view Wikipedia anyway today (ssllabs.com). —Ruud 10:28, 20 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep template still appears to have some uses Hawkeye7 (talk) 23:50, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Note that the template has already been disabled and no font is assigned anymore.  10:16, 20 March 2016 (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).