Template talk:WikiProject banner shell

Category:WikiProject banners placed outside the banner shell false negative

Just found one from 2017: Old revision of Category talk:Films about Olympic equestrian sports.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:32, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Where is the bot told that {{WPEQ}} is a redirect for {{WikiProject Equine}} — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:57, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Oops, I forgot that the canonical name was required to check for in/exclusion. Cewbot has done so much work that I figured it would have already run over a page that old.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  15:54, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Actual false negative this time: Old revision of Category talk:Three-thousanders of Italy is omitted from the cat with this text:

{{WikiProject banner shell}}
{{WikiProject Italy}}
{{WikiProject Mountains}}

With just a pipe present in the shell, the category is correctly added:

{{WikiProject banner shell|}}
{{WikiProject Italy}}
{{WikiProject Mountains}}

~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  13:03, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

1= (revisited)

Back in 2017, I brought up the issue of the "1=" that is sometimes used with this template; see here. Primefac and Nihonjoe responded then, both suggesting that it's not "technically" needed, but also this its absence could create what sounded like technical issues to me ("it could exit that first parameter early"). I'd love to understand this better. Should we note the "1=" in the template documentation? For consistency and to avoid any technical issues, would it make sense to add the "1=" to all instances of this template? Thanks, Jweiss11 (talk) 15:31, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

My answer from back then hasn't really changed much, though I will note that AWB adds in the 1= automatically as part of genfixes. It's not "wrong" to use it, but I suspect you'll struggle to find any sort of strong consensus one way or the other regarding it. Primefac (talk) 09:09, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Primefac, can you explain what you meant by "it could exit that first parameter early"? Jweiss11 (talk) 17:08, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Pipes and equality signs are special characters in templates, meaning if you had something like |u + me = ˂3 and |1=u + me = ˂3 they are parsed differently. Pipe were what I was thinking of in regards to my original comment (a stray | that isn't written by {{!}} will move on to the next param) so I slightly misspoke, but "not passing a first parameter" could potentially be an issue. I will note that nested parameters avoid this, so a stray = is less likely to bork things but is still a possibility if a template is misformed. Primefac (talk) 08:57, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Category for talk pages without WikiProject?

I am sort of surprised there is no category for pages like Special:Permalink/1166488811 that have the banner with no WikiProject included. Would that be something possible to implement? 1234qwer1234qwer4 00:59, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

It's in Category:Stub-Class articles which is the parent category for the all stub class articles — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:57, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

@1234qwer1234qwer4: To expand on what Martin said, any page that is in Category:Stub-Class articles#mw-pages (and indeed in Category:Start-Class articles#mw-pages, etc.) has a WikiProject banner shell that does not enclose any actual banners. If you add a banner - say like this - it moves out of that category and into one or more of its sub-categories. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:55, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Oh! Makes sense, thanks. 1234qwer1234qwer4 18:04, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps you were requesting a new category like Category:Articles without WikiProject banners? I seem to remember this being discussed previously, but can't remember what the conclusion was — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:04, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Display a preview warning when blp parameter missing?

Presently, when {{WikiProject banner shell}} contains {{WikiProject Biography}} but |blp= is unset, the Talk page is silently categorised Category:Biography articles without blp parameter. Recently, I cleared over 100 entries from that category, only for them to be replaced by new additions to the category within a week. I suspect this is partly because the template provides no visual feedback that anything is wrong to editors.

Could a visible preview warning be added to provide a visual indication that something is missing? – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 22:27, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

Why not just get a bot to fix them? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:22, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

How would a bot know if the subjects of an article are alive or dead? For bands and lists, it would have to know whether all the members/list entries are still alive. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 23:24, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

Other difficulties for automating it are that the bot would have to be able to set |blp=activepol for living politicians who are currently active, and |blp=other for biographies about deceased individuals that include substantial or sensitive material about living relatives/friends/others.

I don't think this is something that can be automated. The best we can do is display a warning in preview to encourage human editors to not neglect |blp= when they add {{WikiProject Biography}}. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 18:31, 12 October 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. Do you want to write some code for it? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:38, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand Lua well enough. I'm not even sure how the module detects the presence of {{WikiProject Biography}} to begin with. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 15:51, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

I think that it's the other way around. I suspect that rather than {{WikiProject banner shell}} looking inside its box, it's {{WikiProject Biography}} that looks out of the box to see if {{WikiProject banner shell}} has set values for |blp= and |listas=, and if one or both of these is not set, it's Biography that puts the page into Category:Biography articles without listas parameter/Category:Biography articles without blp parameter as appropriate. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:34, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Redrose is correct. These checks are done by Module:Check blp parameter which is called by {{WikiProject Biography}}. So we could probably put a preview warning on that template but not on the shell itself. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:06, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

I've implemented a basic method of getting a preview warning into {{WikiProject Biography/sandbox}}. I assume it would be better to implement it into Module:Check blp parameter but I don't know how to do that.

When {{WikiProject Biography/sandbox}} is used on an article Talk page without a valid value of |blp= it produces a visible warning in preview.

Should I submit an edit request or wait for someone to implement it into the module instead? – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 19:48, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

That module was overdue an update and simplification, so I've gone ahead and added the warning there. Please check if that is okay? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 00:42, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank-you! Seems to work well. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 13:11, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

Then  Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:10, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks again! Hopefully the backlog stops growing so quickly from now on. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 22:03, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

How many WikiProject banners are permitted in a template?

I've noticed that there seems to be a convention that the banner shells only include at most two WikiProjects. However, the banner shell template itself seems to permit an arbitrary number of WikiProjects.

Is it acceptable to include three or potentially four WikiProjects in the banner shell? As an example, Buddhist caves in India has five WikiProjects. I was actually intending to use it as an example of a page which might relate to WikiProjects India, Buddhism, and Archaeology, but it turns out it's tagged as Buddhism, India, Caves, Architecture, and Visual arts. I'll admit that definitely feels excessive, and Visual arts is a very questionable tag! (Apparently "visual arts" means different things in different places.)

On a related note, is the order of the WikiProjects intended to reflect their relevance/importance to specific WikiProjects? • ꕤ Stylomecon ✎ • «talk» • 13:14, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

There is no limit on the number of WikiProject banners, as long as they are all relevant. If the box gets too big, you can use the |collapsed=yes option — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:01, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

To your related question, no they usually are arranged based upon the criteria of whatever editor added them.—Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 15:04, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

@MSGJ @Tcr25 Thank you both. I suppose as a related question, is it considered a faux pas to tag articles as pertaining to a particular WikiProject if you aren't a member of that group? • ꕤ Stylomecon ✎ • «talk» • 17:33, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

Nope, it's similar to adding categories to an article page. You don't want to add every WikiProject that's tangentially related to an article, but where there's a good reason, go ahead and add it.—Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 19:49, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

@Stylomecon: Talk:Roman Empire has about thirty, and Talk:World War II has over sixty. There may be talk pages having even more, but nothing (yet) springs to mind. As with categories, the most relevant ones should go first, and the less relevant ones last. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:33, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

We normally put categories in alphabetic order. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:55, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

No, there is no consensus for alpha sorting of cats, see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 114#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Indeed, MOS:CATORDER states Eponymous categories should appear first. Beyond that, the order in which categories are placed on a page is not governed by any single rule (for example, it does not need to be alphabetical, although partially alphabetical ordering can sometimes be helpful). Normally the most essential, significant categories appear first. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:07, 11 November 2026 (UTC)

I have no idea how to judge what the most essential, significant categories are. Here's an article I created last week. What order should the categories be in? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:51, 12 November 2026 (UTC)

For what it's worth, both seem like logical approaches, and it should be readily apparent which convention is being used. If it's unclear what an ordering of relevance would be, or if doing so would be contentious, it seems highly appropriate to just alphabetise them instead. • ꕤ Stylomecon ✎ • «talk» • 20:04, 12 November 2026 (UTC)

Talk:Roman Empire has about thirty, and Talk:World War II has over sixty. Holy moly. • ꕤ Stylomecon ✎ • «talk» • 23:20, 11 November 2026 (UTC)