Template talk:UK-SLD

www.legislation.gov.uk

Can we switch to the new UK Government Legislation portal, please? The current service is being discontinued: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/help#aboutOpsiSld Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:16, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Two problems:

1. The old website can cope with both the original ActiveTextDocId form of the URL and the newer (more intuitive) hierarchical form, whereas the new website seems only able to cope with the latter. So unless we can find a translator, articles using this template (which relies on ActiveTextDocId) will need to be migrated manually.

   For example, compare the following links to section 23A of the Interpretation Act 1978 (1978 chapter 30):

   • Y http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?ActiveTextDocId=1838184 (the original scheme at its simplest)
   • Y http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/documents/1978/30/ukpga/c30/23A (this newer scheme is not widely used but is documented[1])
   • N http://www.legislation.gov.uk/content.aspx?ActiveTextDocId=1838184 (I guessed a few other URLs along these lines, none of which worked; the URI format is documented[2])
   • Y http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/30/section/23A (translatable from the new scheme of the old website)

2. The new website does not yet have some of the functionality of the old one:

   "There is some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database and OPSI websites that is not yet available on legislation.gov.uk. This functionality will be added in a future release. Functionality [that is currently missing] includes:

   • Inclusion of Welsh Language text
   • Explanatory Notes Interweave
   • Inclusion of associated documents including correction slips
   • Full Content Search
   • Geographical Extent Search on Revised Legislation
   • Confers power to make subordinate legislation details alongside each Act
   • Blanket Amendment details alongside each Act"[3]

   The related API[4] is described as "a beta version of the API ... the site is somewhat experimental and may suffer unexpected outages."[5]

The hierarchical URL scheme is a better one, so it would be reasonable to convert existing references to the new scheme on the old website, most of which could then be easily converted to the new website once the functionality is more fully implemented.

— Richardguk (talk) 01:13, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

I've left a link to this discussion under your comment at Template talk:Infobox UK Legislation#legislation.gov.uk.

The following templates would also appear to be relevant, but I have not commented on their talk pages in case anyone thinks this discussion is in the wrong place:

• {{UK-SLD-Subdivision}}
• {{UK-SLD}}
• {{UK SI}}
• {{SSI}}

— Richardguk (talk) 01:24, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

• {{OPSI}} will also be affected. Road Wizard (talk) 18:31, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Johnlsheridan I am the civil servant with responsibility for legislation.gov.uk and the two predecessor services, working the The National Archives in the UK. I would strongly recommend and encourage you to change to use legislation.gov.uk URIs at this stage, in particular for citations using identifier URIs of the form http://legislation.gov.uk/id/.

To clarify a few points. The API documentation needs to be updated. We now consider the API to be both stable and fully operational. We are aiming to start redirecting traffic from the current two sites next week, starting with OPSI and then moving on to the SLD. The 'missing' functionality currently available on SLD but not legislation.gov.uk is easily outweighed by the benefits of legislation.gov.uk - and several more features will be added in a series of updates over the next few weeks.

I really see no benefit to wikipedia by sticking with the old URLs. We would also welcome feedback on how we should best handle the redirects. For example, would a webservice that supported requests of the form http://www.legislation.gov.uk/content.aspx?ActiveTextDocId=1838184 be helpful? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnlsheridan (talk • contribs) 14:16, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the input Johnlsheridan, and for your constructive declaration of interest.

The new URL schemes (on both the statutelaw.gov.uk and the legislation.gov.uk websites) have the double advantage of (1) being parsable to humans and (2) of indicating that if the legislation is updated in future, then the link will be to the latest version (except for SIs etc that are not updated or where the URL specifically opts out of the latest version). Conversely, it is unclear whether ActiveTextDocId URLs change or their content changes when the legislation they point to is updated. So I agree that they are to be preferred in principle.

But for a sensible migration, your help would be invaluable in three ways:

1. For all SLD and OPSI users, a permanent redirect from obsolete OPSI and SLD URLs is a reasonable expectation, preferably matching ActiveTextDocId values to the new URLs. As the OPSI URLs chunk documents instead of paging them hierarchically, it would be understandable if those links redirected to the whole document.
2. For all SLD users in particular, equivalent pages on the new website using the same ActiveTextDocId would be very helpful, as you suggest. This would also allow you to apply a simple rule to the obsolescent statutelaw.gov.uk server to redirect browsers to the new page. These could, in turn, be re-redirected under the preceding rule. (I'm assuming the OPSI site doesn't use ActiveTextDocId in its published URLs.)
3. For Wikipedia, it would be helpful to be able to convert a list of all the statutelaw.gov.uk URLs to a list of the corresponding URLs on the new website. We could then get a bot to update each page here. If feasible, this could be provided here via a userpage or by email to a bot operator. I have created a list using Special:LinkSearch/*.statutelaw.gov.uk. There are currently links from 2,661 enwiki pages to about 1,300 unique ActiveTextDocId values at the old website (manually excluding values only found on talk or user pages). I have listed these current linked ActiveTextDocId values at User:Richardguk/ActiveTextDocId#Data in case you want to provide lookups for them now. (If so, please feel free to add the output to a new section on the same page.) But clearly editors are likely to continue adding old-style links until the old websites are actually replaced with HTTP redirects (or 404'd if you are being evil!), so this could only be an interim task.

One minor question. What purpose does the ​id/​ directory serve in the new URL scheme? It seems to get dropped in practice.

Hope that's helpful. Thanks again.

— Richardguk (talk) 23:11, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Mainly as a fun task, I wrote a new template (Template:UK-LEG) that uses this new API. Rather wonderfully, it allows for just one parameter, the name, which we can pass using ​{{PAGENAME}}​, because the vast majority of uses of this template will be on articles about the selfsame statute. I've also added a ​title​ parameter for pages where this is not true. Now, I know that we're encouraged to use the canonical URIs, but this is so easy to use (and surely can't add too great a load on the legislation.gov.uk servers) that I'm tempted to use this for a while. I did also code a simple one that outputted a canonical URI, but it's really not user friendly at all (plus we then have to start worrying about regnal years before 1962). ninety:one 22:31, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean – the canonical URL ought to be the best one, but the template does work very well, and the legislation.gov.uk website does a good job of coping with minor variations (such as variation in punctuation and capitalisation, and acts whose titles are also contained within the titles of statutory instruments).

Most Wikipedia template names are "Sentence case" and unabbreviated, so you might want to consider moving it to a template name that is more likely to endure! But that's a very minor point. {{UK legislation}} is already used for something else. How about {{Legislation.gov.uk}}?

Perhaps too, for flexibility, an additional parameter could specify the path, as an alternative to the title, i.e. any text to be appended to ​http://www.legislation.gov.uk/​.

— Richardguk (talk) 00:32, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I only called it that after this one, but maybe {{UK legislation link}}? Added a ​path​ parameter. ninety:one 23:31, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Moving onwards

Can anyone see any reasons to prevent us from beginning a more complete rollout of {{UK-LEG}}? Are we happy with that name, or shall we go to {{UK legislation link}}? Also, see discussion here about deprecating {{OPSI}}. ninety:one 15:57, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Update: see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom#Legislation linking: new/updated templates for a general discussion on all of these changes. ninety:one 22:09, 22 December 2010 (UTC)