Template talk:Verified
Tool to aid quality assurance
It has become increasingly clear lately that an automated mechanism was needed to ease the process of distinguishing material that has been recently reviewed and updated and the significant amount of material that has not been updated since the changes of HD.
After some discussions on the subject confirmed my own thinking on the matter, I have uploaded this template to allow editors to mark material as Verified for a particular update revision and put a timestamp on the revision. Subsequent reviewers can review the material after a particular time period has passed and updated the revision and timestamp. The template additionally put verified material in a verified category for each class of page to allow for easy parsing by bots.
For an example see Fiery Ridicule. Any feedback would be welcome. Snarpel (talk) 22:28, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
- Nicely done! It sort of overlaps with page history, but would help a lot with identifying areas of the wiki that are out of date. If this gets widespread use, we can get some bots trained to collate pages by their "update version" every so often.
- What would you think about moving it to the top of the page? I wish I could suggest a little squre in the top right or left, but there's no one solution that would work for quests/NPCs/items with the right-side infobox and skills/effects/traits on the left.
- I'm also not sure about the category. What happens at Update 14.3? Do we go around and remove all the tags to get stuff out of "Verified"? Maybe a set "Verified for xyz" categories, instead, where xyz are version numbers? Sethladan 03:11, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- I didn't give a lot of thought to the categories tbh, I just wanted to put something up fairly quickly and discuss some of the finer details after. Categories with update revision are certainly an improvement.
- Also: I'm thinking you might need to subst: the {{REVISIONUSER}} bit, too, since it'll update to whoever made the last edit on the page (see Fiery Ridicule). Try fooling around with
{{sub<includeonly />st:{{REVISIONUSER}}}}- applying this for the timestamp would let you cut out that parameter, too...if it works like I think it should. Sethladan 03:21, 3 October 2014 (UTC)- Yes, a pretty obvious mistake. The username will need to be passed in as a parameter as well, until I can figure a way to get substitution to work from the template. I tried all kinds of tricks with subst/safesubst and includeonly but couldn't get it to work properly. I will keep trying to get it working though.
- I vote for the top -- and centered. (Probably easily done using the html center command - don't know if there is another way to do it as easily/consistantly with Wikimarkup.
- You can always shove the template across the page by preceding it with a bunch of colons ::: -- but that is not "repeatable." :)
- (Good idea, by the way!)
- It will go at the top if you put the template at the top. If you think it looks better centred then I will do it (I will be putting up a new version of the code tonight)
- A problem with REVISIONUSER as implemented --- it changes every time the page is updated, you need to use the
{{sub<includeonly />st:{{REVISIONUSER}}}}syntax
- A problem with {{subst:REVISIONTIMESTAMP}} -- this is optional, if left blank the date and time of the latest revision is used, which is identical to the substitution generated.
- You can also simply insert values, however, they can be very unpredictable. If for example you insert the day of the week, it will pick the date of the NEXT matching day of the week. For example, if you use "Tuesday" (on today Friday 3 October), It will substitute Tuesday 7 October!
- Also: I'm thinking you might need to subst: the {{REVISIONUSER}} bit, too, since it'll update to whoever made the last edit on the page (see Fiery Ridicule). Try fooling around with
- I had an ah-ha moment this morning and realized that my cute little subst: trick wouldn't work in this case (I was thinking in terms of Template:Welcome which is a different case). What we might be able to do is use a helper template to handle the substitution. I'll play with the idea when I have some time; I don't like excessive complexity, but balanced against fewer parameters for quick'n'easy entering of this template...I'll take it.
- Also, please don't scatter your comments throughout the text - in a multiply-indented discussion like this, stuff will get lost if it's not signed. Think of each successive indent as a forum thread and tag onto the end of a branch when you can. Sethladan 15:28, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
- <center></center> isn't supported in HTML5, but I think
<div style="margin:auto;"></div>will do the trick. I'm also wondering if we should roll this template up into the style of the older amboxes or perhaps the other way around. (This one is much prettier.) Sethladan 19:17, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- <center></center> isn't supported in HTML5, but I think
- Ambox might be the answer. The current template "ends badly" -- see: Category talk:Verified -- the template inserts, but ?clears? indentations.
- This and the ambox family of templates are block-level content - divs and tables. You can't throw them in-line and ask them to behave like regular text. Sethladan 00:15, 4 October 2014 (UTC)
Is it a good idea to add a parameter Verified in the templates (Deed, Trait, Skill, Item Tooltip, ...) directly? Maybe the username wouldn't be mentioned, but it would be simpler to add a line at top of a page, let's say after those 2 parameters mode & arg (& amount for Item Tooltip)? Ex.:
| mode={{{mode|}}}
| arg={{{arg|}}}
| verified = 4.2
The templates modified would then be calling this Verified template. -- Goingbald (talk) 12:50, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
- I'm not sold on this idea - it would mean adding (a little) more bloat into each of those templates that are already way too big. Also, I don't think it would even work directly: Most of the templates you mentioned are already "inside" the black tooltip boxes, so in order to get something above or below them, you would have to have {{Tooltip}} recognize a {{{verified|}}} parameter, and each of the item/skill/trait templateswould need
| mode={{{mode|}}}
| arg={{{arg|}}}
| verified={{{verified|}}}
- If we can get the revision and revisionuser stuff simplified, just slapping {{Verified|14.2}}} onto a page is probably easy enough, right? (Maybe we should switch the "type" and "update" parameters? I think the update is more important than the type, which is usually self-evident.) Sethladan 15:28, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
- Hmmm... here's an interesting idea. I don't know how complex this would be, or if even possible --
- If using the verified parameter in the template (ala Goingbald) can the result be simply the "checkmark" displayed in the pop-up tooltip for the "skill" (or whatever) which itself becomes a tooltip, that displays the gory details. I.e. can a tool-tip have a tool-tip?
- An alternative technique would be treat the Verified entry as we treat the Level of the Loremaster (inspector-lvl) in the Template:Creature template and display.
- Actually, I kinda like that checkmark idea in the tooltip, and I think that's something that could potentially be done with a little work. Especially if we come up with a cute way to style it, like a little green circle with a checkmark and the update number inside. Sethladan 20:04, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
Category structure
- Having Category: Verified Skills as a subset of Category: Skills is more than slightly obscure as it is completely redundant with everything else.
- This same will be true of all of the other categories.
- Well... I've no intention of getting into that argument thank you very much. :) Feel free to remove it from the Skills category if you do desire.
- This same will be true of all of the other categories.
- If it were the NEGATIVE - "Unverified Skills" then it would be a place for people to look for Category: Things to do.
- I don't know if it is worth creating such a category for a bot to use -- my sinuses are not letting me thing logically today :)
- However (to what little brain function moves through the sniffles) it seems to be that rather than having each "Verified XXX" be a subset of XXX -- rather be a subset of a master category Verified which would then have the subset "To be verified" as well as "Verified". That then becomes the working category for the Bot. I believe that makes sense from the point of view of the API.???
- Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:23, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
- Ugh, trying to think with cranky sinuses is the worst. Feel better!
- In terms of bot scripting, I would probably just ignore the categories completely. I was thinking have the bot generate a list of all (skills/items/whatever) based on if they transclude the appropriate template, and then sort out the ones that also transclude this Verified template. That list of unverified pages can then get slapped somewhere and periodically (daily? weekly? cron job could do this) updated by a bot. There might be other ways to do it with categories, but that's just how I plotted it in my head. Sethladan 19:08, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
Documentation
I've revised the /doc page Template:Verified/doc to both move this template to the Article Management Tags framework, and display the optional parameters.
I've also indicated that a new page needs to come into existence
- For guidelines on verification see the yet to be written page Category talk:Verified (or whatever).
I realize that the template is still in flux, but the example usages help to identify usages and issues.
Please check it out
Can we make less intrusive?
I like this template very much and I want to start using it on all pages I edit. However, I find the output very intrusive on the page. It takes up a lot of room and makes for unnecessary scrolling. I think a verification note should be small, unobtrusive, and easy to ignore if you're not looking for it.
I propose we reformat the output of this template to be much smaller and less obtrusive - something like this:
This page has been verified as correct by Gaerlin for Update 18.2 on Mon, 26 Sep 2016.