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Assessment of redirects, categories, and templates

Hi. You might be able to give helpful input in this Village pump (misc) thread, concerning assessment banners on the talkpages of redirects, categories, and templates (Particularly the redirects). I'm curious about big-picture perspectives, and also coal-face problems. Also wanting to get those errors mentioned, looked at, by someone who knows these things. Much thanks. –Quiddity (talk) 23:18, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Module:WikiProjectBanner

Hello all. I've started writing a preliminary Lua module, Module:WikiProjectBanner, to supersede WPBannerMeta. It is still in the early stages, and I am still deciding exactly what features it should have. From the discussion above, and from my own ideas, I have come up with the following list:

• Unlimited task forces and notes - no more fiddly hook code.
• Implement all existing hooks in Lua. (Perhaps as sub-modules for complex hooks.)
• Detect invalid parameters without having to pass them through to the WikiProject template. (This is now technically possible, as Lua modules can see arguments passed to the parent of the invoking template as well as arguments from the invoking template itself.)
• Fully customisable class masks and importance masks that you can set directly in the module invocation. (No more need for a separate {{class mask}} invocation for each project.)
• Automatic documentation.
• Automatically generate TemplateData output on template documentation pages (see mw:Extension:TemplateData).
• Make parameter alias names available to the module. Previously, aliases were specified in the individual WikiProject templates (e.g. |tf 3 = {{{Nebraska|{{{NE|}}}}}}), and there was no way for WPBannerMeta to know whether or not an alias was being used. Explicitly defining aliases will enable good automatic documentation and TemplateData output.

I am sure that there must be other features that people would like, though. Is there anything that you have wanted to do with your WikiProject template that hasn't been possible with WPBannerMeta? Let me know and I will try and include it. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 11:50, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I think it would be good to also potentially do the following things:

1. Allow project to display their task forces horizontally like is done in Template:US Roads WikiProject. Kumioko (talk) 13:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
2. This is going to take a bit to explain but be able to allow a project to be marked as primary within a template and what order with most important on top. Template:WikiProject United States has a lot of projects it supports. But it would be nice if we could set which was the primary for the article. For example, for Arizona, we should set Arizona as the primary and let WikiProject United States display as the smaller associated project.
3. Potentially it would also be nice to display more than once on an article. For example there are occassions where more than one project may apply and there may be more than one "primary". Using the Barack Obama article I would argue that there are a couple of associated projects within the WPUS template that should display separately. That way one template could be used to display more than one project and use the core logic of that template once to drive the parameters and categorization that is shared by the multiple projects. Particularly when the projects have limited activity there is less of a need for them to have their own template and logic IMO. Kumioko (talk) 13:20, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

These are food for thought, although number one should be simple enough. I'm not sure I'm understanding two and three properly, though. For number two, would this mean essentially specifying an order to display task forces on any given talk page? And for your number three, could you give the names of the projects that you think should be separate on the Obama article? I think it would help me to see a concrete example. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Number 2 is basically just setting which project is set as the primary. So if you had multiple projects in a template we could set which one is the main one. So instead of the WPUS icon and info taking center stage and Arizona being smaller and embedded they would switch and Arizona would be the main one and United States would be the smaller one. I hope that explains it but I can create something to explain it graphically if that would be easier. For number 3, I think a good example would be the U.S. Presidents one. So instead of it being embedded with the others it would appear as a separate project within the wrapper like Kansas and U.S. Congress but still be coded in the WPUS template. That's just an example and I can give somem better ones if you want. Kumioko (talk) 14:33, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

No, I got it that time, thanks for the explanation. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:51, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I've just thought of another question. In the case of the WPUS banner, at the moment the task forces are displayed in exactly the same way as the WikiProjects, because of the limitations in WPBannerMeta. But with this new module, we could remove this limitation. So if you could format the WikiProjects and the task forces differently, how would you do it? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:06, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Well that's a good question. I'm not sure I know of a better way to display it. As I mentioned above I think it would be good to set the primary but other than that, I'm not sure. Kumioko (talk) 20:03, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

• Wow! This looks awesome. Lua can do all of those things? Maybe once you are done with this we can talk about a module to overhaul the article creation wizard or the teahouse host/guest signup process? Technical 13 (talk) 13:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

• Yep, that's all possible. You should learn some Lua too, I'm sure you would enjoy it. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

• It's on my loooooong todo list... I just bumped it up some and have been asking around trying to put together a "team" of sorts to try and put a framework together for some modules for this project. Would you be interested in just shadowing the project? Technical 13 (talk) 16:56, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

As for Kumioko's item 1, Template:Canada Roads WikiProject already does the horizontal taskforces. US Roads has other issues that would need sorting as well. Mainly their custom sort option. -- WOSlinker (talk) 14:15, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand what is meant by "display their task forces horizontally". Please give examples of talk pages where the WikiProject banner does this. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:21, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

See Talk:Yellowhead Highway, the Topics section in the banner. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:57, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I see what it does - it feeds |TASKFORCE_TEMPLATE=Canada Roads WikiProject/taskforce into {{WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces}} and wraps that in some HTML to make a two-cell table row before passing that into |HOOK_TF=. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:01, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

That would be basically it as far as I am concerned. mw:Extension:TemplateData looks interesting. I would welcome an easy way to discover available parameters of a template, though I am not sure whether TemplateData would leave room for everything that would be relevant for Rater. Keφr 13:39, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

What other data would you be interested in having available? Perhaps we could file a feature request for TemplateData if the data would be relevant for multiple tools. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:01, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I am afraid some of it would not. Basically, grouping and type annotations — whether a parameter denotes a request, B-class checklist item, task force membership, more detailed information on allowed values than just "string", whether a parameter should be paired with another (like task force membership and importance, request notes). So either TemplateData should make these annotations available through its API or the template code itself should be simple enough to be directly parsed. Keφr 14:10, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Those are good points. I think the first thing we should do is check with the TemplateData people to see if including this kind of information might be possible. I'd also be interested to hear what kind of form the API might take. If using TemplateData turns out not to be doable, there are a number of other ways we could do it, though. We could roll our JSON on the template page, or get the template to output JSON when called with a certain parameter, or do everything with invisible html tags, etc. Using TemplateData sounds the most sane of all of these ways, though, so I'd prefer to go with that if it's feasible. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Skimming through source code, I see TemplateData does not offer arbitrary parameter annotations yet. I would prefer something light on the servers and cacheable, so if TemplateData turns out to be an unfeasible solution, that leaves me with parsing template markup directly. If the module is done well, that should be simple enough. Keφr 15:12, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

At the moment I find it easy to discover available parameters of a template; I just open up the template source and search for triple opening braces. From my experiences of those templates that have so far been converted to Lua, such as {{cite book}}, it is now much more difficult. This is because there is no single page which gives the parameter names in a consistent manner. Sometimes they're processed in the module itself; but sometimes it's a sub-module; and sometimes the sub-module, having detected a particular parameter name, then renames the parameter which is then picked up by the first module. Trying to trace whether a parameter is valid or not, and how it's processed is a nightmare. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:49, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Finding three braces is easy. Discovering what they mean, programmatically, is harder. This is drifting a bit off-topic. What I am talking about here is discovering what parameters a template recognises and presenting that to a user in a specialised tool. (Ever tried Rater? The current version is prototype-quality, really, and this data problem is one of the reasons.) Direct human users should be satisfied with the auto-generated documentation. Though I will note that I find no difference between chasing sub-templates like in {{WPBannerMeta}} and subroutines in modules, and that Module:Citation/CS1 is rather easy to follow in my opinion. Keφr 16:16, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I've seen repeated requests for date stamps on the assessments, so that people know how long it's been since the class was adjusted. I'm not sure that this is a good thing (it's a stub in 2007, it's a stub in 2008, it's a stub in 2009, it's a stub in 2010, it's still a stub in 2011...), but it's a common request. Less commonly, people ask for the name of the person who did the assessment.

You might want to advertise this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

I do not think this is something that Lua can help with. An alternative {{quality assessment}} system has been devised to address this (and some other problems with the current assessment system), but it has not been adopted yet. And it still requires manually filling out the appropriate parameters, though a userscript could remove that burden. (In a few weeks I should have some free time to add this functionality to the next version of Rater. At last.) Keφr 20:12, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

If your talking about that horrible and complicted multipart grading nightmare that was done by WikiProject United States Public Policy for a while I hope it never gets implemented. We have a hard enough time trying to get articles assessed now with simple means. That would ensure they never get graded unless a bot does it. Kumioko (talk) 20:14, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Probably mine talking about that, yes. This might be a bit off-topic, but… what is so horrible about it? It makes sense for me. Please explain. Keφr 20:18, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

First, too much time is spent on assessments now IMO, this will make people spend even more time and will drive a lot of folks away. Second, most projects don't use the B-Class checklist for that reason, it takes too much time and third and more importantly, any assessment below GA is frankly fine as just a subjective guess. If its wrong, its just not that big of a deal. Stub, start, C, it really doesn't make a difference. Even B isn't that big of a deal. Its only when we get to GA, A (for those that use it) and FA/FL. So implementing something that requires a high degree of time and effort just isn't worth it. Kumioko (talk) 20:23, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Recommend adding Module Namespace to class list

As more and more templates are converted into Modules I think the need will arise rather soon that some projects will want to tag a module as they do for Templates. Adding this to the class list isn't all that hard but before I do that I wanted to start a discussion to see if anyone has any comments or problems with doing so. Kumioko (talk) 13:08, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

They could just be bundled in with the templates. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:21, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

That's true too. Good point. Kumioko (talk) 13:28, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

New editor needs help

There is a request for help with a malfunctioning WikiProject banner at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#Templates from a relatively new editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:38, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

I've got the template working for them. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:24, 14 August 2013 (UTC)