Misplaced Pages

I'm sorry, but I'm confused by your meaning: I can't find any place in which I suggested that you go to a wikiproject, so please point me to such a location. I don't remember intending to say that; if I remember rightly, I was meaning that you should file a highly publicised RFC (putting it on WP:CENT, for example) or begin a discussion about the template's future at a prominent community discussion page, such as one of the Village Pumps.

FYI, I'm on a quick lunch break right now (it's 12:50PM here), and I don't expect to be online again until after 8PM. Nyttend (talk) 16:51, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Your close stated that the template was used in a number of wikiprojects. I have no idea which ones. I created an RFC but I disagree with your speedy closing for that reason. There are plenty of highly visible discussions conducted via a simple TFD. If you were correct, there would have been a flood and it would have been an easy WP:SNOW and besides I think it should be obviously that I was disputing the template not supporting the deletion of every single footnote citation. I don't believe in templates for hard-coded citations generally but my first concern is why a singular template is being used for so many various citations. The proper discussion would have been at TfD to split or delete the template (in the holding cell obviously), not for an RFC on the general principles about citations because that's not my issues. I'm going to ask for a chance to plead my case at deletion review; there are very, very few RFCs to discuss changes to a template. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 17:07, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Are you referring to my comment about "project policies"? Some of the project policies in question are WP:CITE and the WP:BURDEN section of WP:V, which would be significantly impaired by the deletion of the template. Had you simply been proposing changes, I would not have closed it as wrong-venue, but you marked Template:GR with a "This template is being discussed for deletion" message, not a merger or modification or other template; the inline bit attached to the template said that it was up for deletion; and your edit marking the template for TFD said "Nominated for deletion". Nyttend (talk) 01:36, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend: I thought you meant WikiProject policies. What policy is affected if we use or don't use a template to store reference tags? Of course, I was advocating the deletion of the template itself, like I advocated for at Template:Lunar crater references to be deleted after being substed at the 1400 or so articles it's at. What do you think Misplaced Pages:Templates_for_discussion/Holding_cell is for? There's been templates there since a year old deletion discussion. I'm well aware of how extraordinarily difficult reference templates are to fix, regular subst won't work right. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 01:47, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

All are vastly smaller templates. Getting consensus on something used by 49,117 pages warrants its own discussion, just like getting rid of a project policy warrants it; we don't get rid of disputed policies by nominating them for deletion, and in the same way, we don't get rid of something used in 1% of all articles by nominating it for deletion. Nyttend (talk) 02:12, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Nyttend:Do you really think your view is so correct that it warrants a speedy keep and no discussion? There weren't issues with discussing the infobox artist template (with more than twice as many uses) they did with the actual proposal, not about where to discuss it and that's way more visible than my issue). That's not a policy rationale there. No one else even suggested it in the course of less than four hours. One editor came with a question on how the template works, that's it. You had no consensus to shut it down. Even with the infobox, it wasn't a single administrator who said that his view is the super vote. I put this up at Misplaced Pages:Deletion_review#Template:Geographic_reference and as I said, the only reason I can see is that you think it doesn't belong there and that's enough to shut down all discussion. Feel free to comment there.

Now, we both know the template is used in all those pages. There were two options for me: (a) put the notice in the noinclude section and see who wanders around to TfD and finds the discussion or (b) put it inline in the template itself so that everyone who sees it knows what's going on. I chose (b) because it's probably the most cryptic template I have ever seen. There is no way for me to put a notice that actually describes how it works (and go ahead and tell me what more I should be doing past where I've noticed the RfC). Nobody in their right mind would expect that a particular citation go to a general "geographic references" template which call them out as 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, ....

This kind of goofy idiosyncratic citation templates are not new. I fully expect years of edits like this because the template system works weird when it's in a ref tag. Now, do you really think we'll get more visibility from places like Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Geography and all the village pump places or from the 47k uses all over the encyclopedia. It's a terrible template: people who actually try to link it to within the general search box (for the entire United States) are immediately slapped down and told the search page is the reference period. That is infinitely more destructive towards WP:V and WP:BURDEN than anything I can think of. How is it better than I can post a city's population and tell you "here's the generic US country search page, go find it" versus the actual page? Look at every single US city page. There is not a single one where you aren't stuck looking at each reference, going to a dozen search boxes and searching and searching again. Why? Because people want a template so they can quickly type in GR|7 one time and never worry about it again. Nonsense. The whole thing deserves to be deleted as a warning against this kind of template-creep. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:59, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

And that Grantville nonsense took over three weeks to clean up on maybe a dozen pages. I was on TfD with practically three of those things a day. I fully expect at least a decade to fix this mess and more of these types. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:05, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

As I have told you multiple times, you nominated the template for deletion, which would have the direct result of causing large amounts of article text to become uncited. This is completely different from a request to merge two templates, and deleting the template would immediately cause these almost-50K pages to violate our verifiability policy's "burden" section. Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale; the participants in a TFD may not decide to ignore the verifiability policy, so the only option is to retain the template unless you obtain consensus at a broad community forum to have the thing replaced. Kindly find such a forum and have your discussion there, or go to such a forum to promote the discussion you've begun at talk; you cannot convince me to become a co-conspirator in an attempt to circumvent a core policy. Nyttend (talk) 03:08, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I am advocating substituting every single use and then deleting the thing. I'm not an idiot who's saying "I don't like that people have sources here, let's delete every link to those sources." If I told you I hated template:imdb and wanted that template deleted, would you say that I want to remove all imdb links? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:12, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Whack!

You've been whacked with a wet trout.