User talk:Joeblakesley/Talk:Infobox british hills (no image)

Here's a blank version of the coding to paste in to relevant articles:

{{Infobox_british_hills_(no_image)|
hill_name=
|country=
|area=
|translation=
|language=
|height_m=
|height_ft=
|rel_ht=
|grid_ref=
|maps=
|listing=
|}}

Proposed Modifications

These proposed modifications also apply to Template_talk:Infobox_british_hills, and Template_talk:Infobox_british_hills_double

• `Country' seems to be being used to specify the nation so should be changed to `Nation'.
• `Area' seems vague. Maybe change to `County' and also include `Nearest town'.
• `Listing' is too vague; maybe `Hill type' (with a link to an article on british hill types based on relative height).
• Maybe the heading for the box should say `British Hills: Name of Hill' instead of just `Name of Hill'.

For mine:

• Country vs. nation gets very complex, but I'm not fussed eitherway really.
• Area: I deliberatley kept that vague, then hills can be described as best makes sense. For example Lake District, Torridon. County would make no sense - nearly all the 'proper' hills are in Highland, and what would be nearest town.
• Hill type/listing - fair enough
• `British Hills: Name of Hill' - fair enough

Grinner 09:49, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

I mentioned my proposals here because I thought you may have labelled them as they are for a reason (so please criticise my reasoning). Responses:

• Country: Compare country v. nation. I think this should be changed simply so non-natives don't get confused ("Is Wales a seperate country now?"), although I've just noticed that the country entry says that the UK is an example of a country composed of seperate nations where the natives do refer to the nations as `countries' sometimes.
• Area: Sorry; that was a bit silly of me. I accept that the geomorphological area (e.g.: Lake District, Snowdonia, &c) using the label "Area" is the best info. to put here. However, I think it also might be helpful to have a seperate label for specifying the political location ("location: nearest town (where appropriate), County"), or maybe one for the nearest town and one for the county.
• Listing: Would "hill type" be an acceptable term, or is "listing" or another term commonly used to describe this in the field? Which do you think best describes it?
• Aside: Does this template relate to hills in the UK, Britain or the British Isles? I'm assuming it must be the latter as it contains one hill from the Isle of Mann (which is neither in Britain or the UK). This should probably be made clear somewhere. Maybe a list of British hills or British hills entry should be made (linked to from the heading of the template table) with a list of the hills, an explanation of what counts as a British hill and an explanation of the different hill types.

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 12:00, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)

• OK change country to nation
• I'll go with most of that, but I do think that county and nearest town would just confuse things. Whats the nearest town to, say, Beinn Alligin? Torridon, Kyle of Lochalsh, Inverness? Is it in Highland, Ross-shire, Ross and Cromarty? Many hills are on county boundaries too.
• Listing - "Hill type" is fine, we could link it in to peak bagging.
• [UK]], Britain or the British Isles, this gets complicated! Basically it is for areas that are covered by the Ordnance Survey - that is England Wales Scotland and IoM. This fits in with the data from the Relative Hills of Britain (Alan Dawson's book on lists).(User:Grinner)

• "Hill type" means nothing to me. It sounds like it would distinguish between "pointy hill, moorland plateau, ridge" and such things. I think "listing" is much more sensible, since this only deals with what lists the hill/summit appears on, and no intrinsic properties of the hills themselves. This is especially important since some of the lists are fairly arbitrary.
• So do we need new templates for Northern Ireland? (Fortunately, no summits in Northern Ireland yet have pages, to my knowledge.) The Infobox_Irish_hills is currently set up only to deal with hills in the Republic, but if Northern Ireland were excluded from "british hills", it would need to go somewhere (eventually).
• I always thought the UK was a nation comprised of smaller countries. Shows how much I know. For that reason, I would prefer Country to Nation, but it seems I'm probably wrong.
• Nearest town is obviously meaningless. I question whether a political area would add much information, what with the frequency of local government changes in the UK. No-one cares whether a hill is on the border between Conwy County Borough & Gwynedd, but anyone will understand what is meant by Snowdonia.

--Stemonitis 16:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree about the nearest town thing. Could turn into a complicated set of arguments for a nearest airport, nearest main road, nearest cash machine, etc. box , which would obviously not be fun. I think 'area' is enough to give some locational context (I'll need to remember that phrase and use it again somewhere... sounds nice and official.) without being so specific as to be meaningless to someone who doesn't know a little about the place generally. Obviously it would probably be best if the area used can be linked to somewhere useful.

Need to remember that the infobox only has to give a summarised over-view and not necessarily include every detail. I think that it is easier to describe where a hill is in the article itself, where nicer language can be used, than to try to fit it into a neat box in the infobox. I don't currently think that there's much of a need for any more fields. Maybe just add more to the articles.

Ironically my slight Nationalist tendencies make me feel that it is better as country, although I'm sure that nation is probably more accurate. As noted above it all gets a bit messy really. Head. Sand. Bury...

Listing would seem to work OK, although I think it is maybe a little vague. Listing could cover things like "Mainland Britain peak furthest from a cash machine" and such. If I was to pick something else I'd probably think that Peak classification would be appropriate, but it's most likely overly technical sounding or something. — PMcM 21:08, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I tend to agree that we don't need more fields, any more detail can be placed in the actual article! Perhaps as regards listing, we could use a link to make things clearer: Listing perhaps? Grinner 10:05, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)

Right, I've added the link to Listing. Grinner 14:55, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

Automatic country flag thumbnails

I recently experimented with the automatic addition of thumbnail flags to the British hills infoboxes, at Template:Infobox british hills. And, while the technique bascially works, it required that the parameter "country" be unlinked, i.e. written as "Wales" instead of "[[Wales]]". I'd be happy to go through all the articles that use the three British hills templates and remove the redundant links, but since this would be a change to the syntax of the infoboxes, I thought I'd better check if anyone disagreed with the change. For an example of how the infobox might look afterwards, check out the Irish and Northern Irish infoboxes at, for example, Carrauntuohill and Slieve Donard. --Stemonitis 29 June 2005 11:40 (UTC)

Looks nice to me. Just one question though, will it cope with Black Mountain, Wales, which straddles the Anglo-Welsh border. Also Windy Gyle if that ever gets a page.

Oh and the box is used by some Manx hills to so make sure it can handle them too.

-- Grinner June 29, 2005 12:47 (UTC)

It will definitely cope with the Isle of Man (test: Isle of Man), but it probably can't cope with border hills. That's a problem. I can only suggest that, where a summit straddles a border, we default to a larger entity, i.e. United Kingdom, and explain in the Region: section why. Since it's only likely to be in a few cases (perhaps just those two?), perhaps we can live with the inconsistency.

The alternative is to encourage authors to use {{WALES}}, {{SCO}} and so forth instead. Someone (probably me) will have to create templates for England and the Isle of Man, but I guess that's not too much trouble, particularly if it enables one to create something that looks like: England / Scotland without any special difficulty.

Which do you prefer? I still tend towards the first option, but am prepared to be flexible. --Stemonitis 29 June 2005 13:38 (UTC)

I've no real problem with the 1st (only likely to be those two hills that I can think of). Go with whichever is easier. -- Grinner June 29, 2005 14:26 (UTC)

Right then. I've changed Template:Infobox british hills double and Template:Infobox british hills (no image), and all the pages that used them. I'll finish off by doing Template:Infobox british hills and the pages that use that tomorrow. --Stemonitis 29 June 2005 15:18 (UTC)

And now I've changed Template:Infobox british hills and the pages that use it. All done. --Stemonitis 30 June 2005 08:32 (UTC)

Well done, good work! Grinner June 30, 2005 09:57 (UTC)

Use WikiProject Mountain infoboxes?

I just stumbled across this template. People may not know about the infobox we're using for mountains (anywhere in the globe). See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains.

How do people feel about using the Mountain template? Rows within the WikiProject Mountains template come in groups. So, if you feel that British hills need more information that a generic mountain, we can add additional rows to the infobox.

-- hike395 07:14, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

The British mountain/hill infoboxes currently show the pieces of information that seem relevant to British mountains (UK Grid Ref, etc.), and not those that are irrelevant (no-one knows who first climbed Snowdon, and no-one cares). While it would certainly be possible to customise the generic infobox to include those data that we use regularly, and exclude the things that are not applicable, I can't see the point. It seems much easier simply to leave things as they are and accept than British hills use a different infobox to those elsewhere. This is not unreasonable, since hillwalking is much more popular in Britain than elsewhere, especially of smaller peaks, or at least so it seems to me. It would perhaps be an improvement to have the British and global infoboxes resemble each other in terms of layout and colour, but I can't see any good reason for trying to unify them beyond that. (If that were to go ahead, I would also say that I prefer the current layout of the British infoboxes to the global ones!) --Stemonitis 07:44, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Agree completley with Stemonitis. Grinner 09:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

It's a pity to have separate infoboxes. Part of the goal of Wikipedia is uniformity of presentation: that is what makes it look like a professional encyclopedia. That's why there are endless discussions at Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

I think it is worth discussing further, to see if we can find some compromise between the two approaches. The "row group" approach is very flexible --- we can accomodate any addition or deletion of rows. Therefore, it's just a disagreement about layout and color, which I think we can discuss. Can we discuss at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General ? Thanks! -- hike395 17:34, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I can see changing to "row groups" will just create lots of work for no purpose. We can get "uniformity of presentation" by altering the format of one of the infoboxes. As Stem says I too prefer the current British Hill Info box, but am prepared to be flexible. Grinner 14:26, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

See the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General --- we can turn this infobox into a meta-template (calling the Mtnbox templates), which means the amount of work to change would be minor. -- hike395 18:40, July 23, 2005 (UTC)