Template talk:Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Why is this template in a vertical display format?

All other navboxes collecting works of an author, and related navboxes (filmographies, discograhies, and so on) are in a horizontal format with tiny bullets. Breaking this convention requires strong justification.

• The main issue is that the navbox is meant to be a compact navigation aid to Wikipedia readers. The point of convention is so that one can rely on past experience and so navigate quickly, accurately, and with a minimum of thought.

• Vega Yunqué gave two of his novels absurdly long titles. In the case of well-known works, when a short version is so standard that it is as well-known or better-known than the actual long title, we use the short form. For example, Hamlet instead of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Readers familiar with the works of Vega Yunqué know and use short forms for his two long titles, like the author did himself. The relevant Wikipedia articles use the short forms as much as possible, but always as an acknowledged short form to the explicit long form. In the navbox, we do not have the luxury of providing both.

• The titles are so long that in a horizontal list, it is peculiarly difficult to see where one title begins and the next ends. In particular, the fourth book with its two-word title tends to be lost, either visually at the end of the third title, or worse, off-screen via a horizontal scroll bar.

• Depending on the reader's screen width and font size (and for all I know, choice of browser), the horizontal list version can display in a more than unusual idiosyncratic manner. One setting lists the first three novels in a vertical list, with the fourth novel tacked on at the end of the third novel. In other words, horizontal formatting comes off as de facto vertical formatting, but in a defective and rather deceptive manner.

• As much as possible, convention is followed. No special color schemes or font changes or the like have been introduced. The usual links in the usual locations are provided. Users of this template are expected to put them in the usual location at the bottom of any Vega Yunqué-related article. The surprise of navigating a vertical list of only six titles cannot be all that great, is scarcely noticeable, and frankly is far easier and more accurate than any horizontal version could be. And because there are only six titles, there simply is not that much extra space.

Bulleted lists

Navboxes are not designed for use with bulleted lists. The reason is obvious: you might as well just put the bulleted list under "See also" and avoid the server overhead and screen clutter of a navbox. For this reason navboxes are normally only recommended (there are some exceptions) if they contain five or more links - when it would become cumbersome to put that many "See also" links on the related articles. Accordingly, I have again removed the bulleted lists. Additionally, there is no reason not to follow the pattern used for every other author in Category:American writer navigational boxes.

Because this template currently contains only two links, it is liable to be nominated for deletion. This would be a pity, as Vega Yunqué is a worthy author, so I hope someone will soon create the necessary articles to be linked from this navbox; I've tried to help by adding some additional titles.

Again, the edit summary "Full titles take precedence" is mistaken: it is commonplace in navboxes to pipe long article titles to much shorter versions. You can (just about) get away with not doing so here, as there are only two links, but screen real estate is limited in navboxes, so long titles do need to be abbreviated.

--NSH002 (talk) 19:58, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

The point of navboxes is not to shorten one article but to navigate through a family of related articles. In this case, those of a writer and his works. Furthermore, your very suggestion that the navbox, by being vertical, is acting as a poor substitute for a "See also" bulleted list in the article, and so if we have a vertically arranged navbox, we should ditch it and put in the standard "See also" vertical list is simply bizarre.

Such a "See also" purpose you are talking about is fundamentally ill-conceived. The works of an author are usually tabulated anyway, and such a purpose would commonly be inappropriate for the individual works, depending on how interconnected or not the works are.

No, the point of a navbox is to be easily found (usually at the end), easy to open or close (Hide/Show), easy to insert (wiki templates), easy to edit (the list syntax), and most importantly, easy to navigate with.

For Vega Yunqué, both short titles and horizontal lists interfere with the "easy to navigate" function. The books are noted for having tl;dr titles, and someone unfamiliar with his works would probably benefit from seeing the tl;dr explicitly, an "oh, right, that's the title I want to look at" that cannot happen with unfamiliar shortenings. Note that someone familiar with his works would be happy with the standard two-word short names (mentioned in the articles), unfortunately, they both occur deep in the middle of the title, and abbreviation to the middle is not as natural as truncating from the front as you tried.

Did you look at your version of the template at various widths and sizes? I assume not. I did, when I first created this template, and got a few ugly messes along the way. I was thinking of all the issues above, and all-in-all, the horizontal list version seemed to be an active hindrance to reader-friendly navigation; I gave up and switched to the vertical list format.

As for deleting it, well, whatever. I created the first two novel articles, I plan to expand them over the next two months, and then I plan to create two more articles on his other two novels. So far as I can tell, the point of the template right now is convenience for me, since I seem to be the only editor actually working on the articles. I'll mention that at the time of creation, I left out the short story collections deliberately since I thought they were not notable enough for WP, but by the time you added them, I had since found enough proof of notability and will probably create an article for Mendoza's Dreams by this summer. My point is I left them out, not out of laziness, but because the only defensible purpose of a navbox is to help readers navigate, not to recapitulate information, and that is where my thinking is.

So delete, not delete, whatever, doesn't matter in the long run.

If Vega Yunqué had 30 novels, and half of them had tl;dr titles, well yes, you'd have a point regarding navbox real estate: too many of them would certainly interfere with navigability. But his total output is quite limited, so it's a completely irrelevant argument on your part. Stick to issues that interfere with navigability, not that might interfere in some other circumstances.

By the way, "A Symphonic Novel" is not really a subtitle for Bill Bailey. (I'll probably include information on this in the article sometime next week.) I can't take your concerns about real estate very seriously when you included it spontaneously.

I haven't made any of these decisions in the dark, blindly, or cluelessly. I already agree with your arguments in the appropriate circumstances. Over on Template:U.S. state attorneys general I aggressively reverted attempts at expanding the non-essential information, precisely because of limited real estate. I followed horizontal format and very little piping on Template:Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album despite some tl;dr entries, because the standard format worked just fine there. And I have created two previous author templates Template:Joseph McElroy and Template:Michael Brodsky, greatly rewrote Template:Carl Sandburg (in explicit ask-first-edit-later consensus with its creator), and I have some more on the way, in the standard formats. Choor monster (talk) 23:10, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Here is one further remark about how you've convinced me that you simply don't know what you're talking about, just throwing criticisms around in the hope that something sticks. You suggest that by being horizontal and giving the appearance of a bullet list, we as might as well avoid the "server overhead" of the navbox template. Really? This template is impacting the Wikipedia Project that badly?

Seriously, the rule is that editing decisions are to be made exclusively based on what's good or bad for Wikipedia as a reading/editing experience, and never out of concern for "server overload". The exceptions are few and are decided by the people the Foundation employs whose job includes keeping an eye on system performance, based on actual numbers. For example, template use and non-use on the Main Page. When Vega Yunqué and his novels get that much traffic, they will be the ones to raise "server overload" issues. Choor monster (talk) 10:49, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

hlist

Wrapping looks fine to me at all size with an hlist; why the reversion? Above, it seems completely arbitrary to claim there's a navigation problem when there's no evidence to support it. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:39, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

See explanation above. When I first created this template, I did experiments with text size and browser width, and sometimes the hlist came out quite confusing looking, with short and long lines mixed in what I found to be unpredictable ways. For example, my default size/width gives me "The Comeback *" on a line by itself, then a line break, then the long title "No Matter ...", then a line break, then "* The Lamentable ... * Blood Fugues". In other words, the browser is rendering a vertical list anyway, except it's hiding title #4 using variant display tucked at the end of title #3. That's completely unacceptable.

Considering how loooooooooong two of the titles are, even if the titles wrap in the predicted way, it is extra difficult to read. Someone who knows Vega Yunqué's titles will be able to find what he's looking for without too much difficulty, someone who doesn't and is browsing could see just three titles or get lost in the tl;dr effect of titles #2 and #3 wrapped together. Choor monster (talk) 19:05, 27 April 2014 (UTC)