Talk:Boilerplates
Completeness
Someday perhaps I will have the energy to include all the listings from the boilerplates category page. David 15:14, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Boilerplate vs Template/doc files
The issue raised
- Regarding the Boilerplate: I don't even know why we have this. The only thing the boilerplate does is duplicate the work of the template documentation. Can we cut out the middleman and just direct people to the source? As a more immediate fix, though, I went ahead and manhandled Template:Documentation to hide the link text and green box in cases where it's being rendered outside of the Template namespace. I still think it's bad practice to transclude pages wholesale (that's what links are for!), but this will at least keep things looking less ugly. Sethladan 13:54, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
One answer
Historically, the Boilerplate pages were for "cut and paste" page creation. That's why they always had a "clean copy" section. However, with the advent of the "Create new xxx" tools, the problems caused by people cutting and pasting have become more significant and pronounced. To me, it is much the same problem as has been created by people who delete the things they are not interested in from a Template rather than simply leaving them blank. While deleting the "surplus stuff" makes a page "cleaner," it does make it more difficult to modify things in the future.
- Example: As a side effect of creating a Beorning, I've been going through many of the early quests and items -- and discovering that they are radically changed. Turbine has modified the "display" information sometimes significantly. Some things, like the "attributes" are no longer A)only one color B)Green C) now have "titles" like "Target" and "Wield" in one color and the specific "thing" in another color. I've just been stringing them in one line in the template using <br />{{color|xxx|<text}} to make multiple lines and change colors. Item: Gleaming Scimitar is one new item; Item: Defender of Cardolan is an updated one.
And, as usual, Turbine is not terribly consistent in the sequence in which they insert their text descriptions. The other, still useful, aspect of the boilerplate is to provide the "example" text of the "rest of the page." I.e. the information not provided by the template. The Item boilerplate is one example of this.
- As I'm writing this, I'm thinking -- this "sort of answer" should be someplace "general" ...
Boilerplate sync
I've had the thought since my first edit here -- there is so much "documentation" which is out of sync with itself. The most recent issue with Titles is a classic case where the Doc page, the Boilerplate and the Preload all said something different.
- There should be a way to "automagically" included all of the parts -- the way the template/doc file gets included, both so one needs only update one location, but so that problems do not occur if a change is made, but not documented.
I haven't really thought about this problem for quite some time now, but it raises the question -- is there anything "special" about the /doc and /preload structures? (And I may be showing my age here -- my experience with databases goes back long before there was such a thing as Php, and they were seriously structured.) If the Wiki were a flat file system, such things would make sense, but I don't completely understand that part of the MediaWiki infrastructure. It's not as if you can do an "ls" of a Page and get a listing of its sub pages. The closest I've ever seen is the "Category Tree" extension - which sort of does an "ls" type listing of Categories, but not of pages. The DPL - Dynamic Page list Extension (we use one of two versions) is similar.
- Hmm... I did just find: {{Special:PrefixIndex/User:Magill/}} https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Subpages
Have to think more about this issue.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:07, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
- I'm a newb when it comes to behind-the-scenes stuff, so for what it's worth: Before I learned that the boilerplates are not always up to date, I liked being able to copy and paste directly from the clean copy because it's faster than the Create new ___ method (which requires typing in the name then scrolling to the bottom to copy). For all the crafting recipe indices I've worked on, 9 times out of 10 I've started with red item links in an index page (as suggested by Help:Article_Creation#Expert_Techniques), so the name is already given. -Laineth (talk) 21:24, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
- Boilerplates are great! They save a huge amount of work of copy+paste. Updating documentation is always something that is late, sometimes the documentation is months behind; that is nothing new or different. Boilerplates will have the exact same problems.
- In my opinion, the time saved justifies the work (the administrators) will have updating the boilerplates.
- But then again, creating a boilerplate for something as small as a title may be too much.
- Mogafi (talk) 05:05, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
- The major issue I have with Copy Paste -- especially when duplicating existing items -- those items copied from, probably do NOT have the most recent changes to the templates included -- prime example currently is the "| item_level = " parameter. This same issue has been true when copying Boilerplates, i.e. the fact that the Boilerplates do NOT reflect the latest templates.
- The second issue has to do with the "| disambigpage =" parameter. This has to match the actual page name. The problem occurs with special characters in the page name, especially the apostrophe. Normally copy from the Boilerplate does not have an issue as it includes the - "| disambigpage = Talk:Boilerplates" string, which will pick up the "correct" (I.e. the version the WIKI uses) character in the page.
- BTW: As far as scrolling to the bottom -- Don't forget, depending on your browser and keyboard, you can use the "Home" and "End" keys to jump to the Top and Bottom of a browser page (or any foreground page for that matter). Much faster than scrolling!