Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 November 16

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November 16

Template:List of Dish Network SD Channels 2-899

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was delete --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 11:23, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Template:List of Dish Network SD Channels 2-899 (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Unused template. May or may not meet criteria for inclusion in article space. Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 07:05, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

• Delete -Not used at all in article namespace (with the exception of a redirect). Would this be the article of the broadcasting network in question? Master&Expert (Talk) 17:59, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
• Delete - redirect mentioned above would be taken to WP:RfD as a cross-namespace redirect, but if the "template" is delete, CSD R3 (and the former R1) would apply. The "template" is a template in name only (in fact, I was preparing to move this into article space to prepare this for AfD as an article in violation of WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE. B.Wind (talk) 03:03, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Template:List of Dish Network International Channels

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was delete --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 11:25, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Template:List of Dish Network International Channels (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Unused template. More appropriate for mainspace, although it may not meet criteria there, either. Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 07:04, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

• As per my argument on the above TfD, delete. Master&Expert (Talk) 18:01, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
• Delete this "template" in name only (the cross-namespace redirect to this one has been deleted by RfD). Similar to the one above, I was preparing to move this one in article space and prepare it for AfD per WP:NOT (see above). B.Wind (talk) 03:07, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Template:Near-close central unrounded vowel

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was subst and delete. As a linguistics specialist and admin, I find this discussion simultaneously interesting and quite painful. Basically, following the policies and what I know about the IPA, the best solution from an administrator's point of view would be to substitute the template in all of its instances and delete the template. As a non-standard IPA symbol, it would be more difficult, but not impossible, to create this as a stand-alone article which meets notability and verifiability guidelines, although I am not 100% satisfied with this content as its own article, either. The simple answer is that we need a simple answer: prose template are extremely strongly discouraged, and in a case like this I would imagine especially so. Therefore I feel the best way to proceed by a policy standpoint is the way I have outlined above. RyanGerbil10(Four more years!) 03:19, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Template:Near-close central unrounded vowel (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

This text should be substituted into each of the articles it's transcluded in. Article text belongs in mainspace. Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:33, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

The point of having it as a template is so that the two copies don't get out of whack with future edits. Is there a way of doing that in mainspace? kwami (talk) 07:18, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes. You move the article to it's own title in mainspace, and then provide very short summaries (see WP:Summary style) in the articles that would otherwise talk about them, with a {{main}} "Main:" link at the top of the section. That way, you still have something in the original articles, and anyone who wants to know more can click through to the main article, and if they want to edit there, then they'll edit there.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 10:03, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I say move it to mainspace. If we also add a link to its mainspace article to Template:Vowels (perhaps using the X-SAMPA representation and some sort of note), it won't even be necessary to have sections about it in the other vowel articles that currently transclude this. Pi zero (talk) 15:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

This is not a solution. It did not have its own article because it was judged to not be notable enough for its own article. There are several vowel sections like this, which are only a paragraph and belong equally in two other articles and which are not particularly notable on their own. What we want to do is transclude them. It's irrelevent which article space we transclude from, but if we can't transclude from main space, we should transclude from template or wiki space.

Linking from template:vowels was discussed a few years ago, and it was decided that adding unofficial vowels to an IPA template would create a mess, with people fighting over whether their favorite vowel symbol was notable enough to include.

We may decide to split this off to an article of its own, though that's been decided against in the past. However, we would still need a solution for other articles like this. What's the problem with transcluding from template space? kwami (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

The short (and infuriating, though probably dead accurate) answer would be, that's not what template space is for. Another approach that probably isn't as complete as it might seem would be to refer to the humongous archived discussion residing at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace, but I won't pretend to have sifted through it all. Here are a couple of points that occur to me:

• Organization. There should be a single primary location in mainspace for each vowel, so that all links to the subject of that vowel are going to the same place. With a transcluded prose template you couldn't even be sure of a specific finite set of places that might have been linked to at one time or another, because the set of places that transclude the template may have changed over time. If the vowel doesn't have its own article, then it should have one primary location in one larger article. Other vowel articles can link to it, and contain shorter summaries of it if they must, but it needs to be clear that they aren't the place to link to.
• References. There don't seem to be any at all in the template. Do you put a warning in the documentation for the template that says it should only be used in articles that include a certain list of references? Or a warning that it should only be used in articles that use footnotes? Or do you put a list of references in the body of the template, which will be expanded into the wrong place in the transcluding article? These all strike me as Bad Ideas, even worse than simply copying the information in all the different places and then trying to keep all the copies consistent (which would actually be acceptable from a maintenance standpoint, since some of that is inherent in wikipedia anyway, but it wouldn't address the organization point).

Pi zero (talk) 05:11, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Question Where was the discussion that resulted in the decision that this wasn't notable enough for its own article?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 07:48, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea. Several articles were included. (You'll note I created it in the main article space, then moved it a year ago.) The decision was that we should restrict ourselves to vowels with IPA symbols. Same for links from the vowel-chart template. The exceptions are for the mid vowels, such as mid front unrounded vowel, which are dabs because of the frequent use of the term. kwami (talk) 09:19, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, if you don't know where the discussion was, then could you tell me how you know about this decision? Was it at Afd, or on some WikiProject talk page somewhere?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 05:22, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

You're asking me to tell you where a discussion took place over a year ago. I know about it because I was involved in it, having written or expanded some of the articles which were then merged. I doubt it was AfD or a project page. Probably on one of the articles' talk pages, or the talk pages of the people involved, or of the vowel template, etc., or more than one of these. Here's a comment on my talk page* that refers to a vote. I've gone back through my and Aeusoes1's edits prior to that and can't find the vote itself—maybe I just picked up on s.o. else's decision, can't remember. Not saying we shouldn't revisit this, but even if we do decide to stop transcluding this, there are other cases where we might still want to transclude, so, again, what's wrong with doing things this way? kwami (talk) 07:03, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Because we have the different namespaces for a reason. Article content belongs in mainspace. If the article meets notability and verifiability, and I have no reason to doubt that it does, it should be in mainspace, as I said above. If it doesn't deserve it's own article, then it can be subst'ed into one of the articles that currently transcludes it, and the other article(s) can have a short summary with a link to that section. Template space is not for article content.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 07:17, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

"Because there's a reason" isn't much of an argument. I'm asking what the reason is. Or is it just a rule? kwami (talk) 08:05, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

You know, you do have a point there. My initial reaction when I saw this was that someone was trying to get around the article inclusion rules by putting article text in non-article space, where it wouldn't have to meet WP:N or one of the other inclusion guidelines. I apologize for that initial assumption of bad faith. I'm going to go searching for the discussions leading up to the different namespaces. I'm pretty sure that there are better reasons than just "because" for why we have articles in article space, and templates in template space, I just need to go find people who can articulate them better than I can. I'll be back when I've found something.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:19, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) Found: WP:Template namespace (a guideline), which says: "Templates should not masquerade as article content in the main article namespace; instead, place the text directly into the article." It looks like this rule was formulated back in 2005, as far as I can tell from the talk page; see Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#Transcluding_sections and Wikipedia_talk:Template_namespace#Transclusion_within_the_article_namespace. I'll admit I haven't read the whole thing, it's a bit long. But one argument I found there is pretty compelling: if someone comes by to edit the article, and clicks on the "edit this page" tab, then they won't be able to edit it unless they already know about templates. This goes against the founding principle of Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," in my opinion.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:38, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, the editing problem is a good reason. There are some templates with an 'edit' button at the top, so hypothetically (not necessarily for this article), if that were provided, would it still be a problem? For example, mid vowels can be written either with an /e/ or an /ε/, so can the same text still be placed on both the article for /e/ and the article for /ε/? kwami (talk) 18:39, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, can we find sources for this text? If so, and since it really is its own entity, this should be an exception to the IPA-only rule. Move it back to mainspace as its own article, source it, and it should survive Afd. In the alternative, if you want to stick with the IPA-only rule, then substitute the text into whichever article is more appropriate for the longer text, and include a short blurb in the other which a link to the full text in the first article. That way, you won't have to worry about maintaining two identical copies.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:47, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Delete and move the content into article space. This kind of thing should be avoided. It makes Wikipedia more difficult to edit, less accessible. It encourages editing without knowing the context (or other contexts) that your writing is in. If the information belongs in two places, then each should be allowed to be edited to fit its context—right now, every Wikipedia article is “out of whack” with every other, and I like that just fine. —Michael Z. 2008-11-20 06:20 z

I just noticed this discussion today. So let me see if I can't address everyone's concerns.

As kwami mentioned above, the point of this and other prose templates I'm aware of is for the phenomena of material that is

1. deemed worthwhile enough to include in Wikipedia but not as an independent article
2. equally relevant or viable as sections in two or more articles

Thus, it is not an issue of notability but organization. Since said material is equally relevant to near-close vowels as it is to close central vowels, he and I agreed that, for example, the near-close near-front unrounded vowel and the close central unrounded vowel articles should both have identical sections on the near-close central unrounded vowel. The prose template format was thought up as a way to allow the information in both articles to be identical without constant maintenence. While I'm pretty certain that kwami and I were the only ones to decide this, I'm not certain about the discussion that created the consensus against adding unofficial vowels to the IPA template; this may also have been primarily kwami and myself at an earlier date.

• Pi Zero states that one could never be sure of how many pages transclude a prose template but there certainly is such a list available by clicking "what links here". In this particular instance, there is a mainspace redirect that a number of articles link, showing that it is easy to distinguish between articles that link and those that transclude.
• Pi Zero and Aervanath both state that there don't seem to be any references in the template but there are two (see the superscript numbers); they don't show up but in the pages that transclude the template and display footnotes. If it's deemed necessary, the reference format can be altered and I'm sure that kwami can verify the remaining unsourced claims in this particular template. There's no reason why prose templates can't be (or aren't) subject to the same verifiability standards as text in mainspace.
• Aervanath states (and Michael Z seems to back up) that one problem is that someone who wants to edit the content of the template may be unable to do so because the process is complicated. That is to say that clicking "edit" next to the section will bring an editor to an edit box that simply says {{Near-close central unrounded vowel}} rather than the content they wish to edit. However, as kwami implies, this is easily fixed by adding a section header at the top such as I've done with the template under discussion as well as {{voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative}} (another prose template with the same function); visually, the transcluded text appears identical to how it would if it were a section in the article and clicking "edit" will take the user to the edit page for the template. The only difference is that, once the user clicks "submit" the page that loads up is the template page. While this is potentially confusing, it's certainly not as complicated as other methods of editing a page's transcluded text and certainly no reason against the use of prose templates. Other prose templates should do the same and if they do not then there is every reason to make them do so. As I said above, since it's appropriate to do so, I've gone and fixed this problem already.

I pretty much have the same position as kwami. The determination for why we should or shouldn't have this prose template should govern other instances of prose templates (i.e. the alveolar fricative ones I just created the other day). Given the limiting criteria I've presented above, I don't foresee a great rise in prose template creation. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 09:00, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Aeusoes1, you raise some good points. Thanks for joining the discussion. While you have enumerated some technical workarounds for making this text seamlessly editable (good job on that, by the way), I'd like to ask why it's necessary. Kwami has referenced a prior discussion that concluded that this text isn't worthy of its own article. However, if it's verifiable and notable (as it is, since you do have references), then why doesn't it deserve its own article? Just based on what I've seen so far, I would hazard that the previous consensus may have been incorrect with respect to the our main policies. Since I haven't seen it, though, I can't make that judgement. So, in this specific case, I still think it should be moved to mainspace as its own article.

For other cases, if the prose in question really would be equally appropriate as sections in different articles...well, pick one. Pick the one that seems most appropriate, and make sure the other articles link to that one.

I guess my main view here is that yes, we could do it the way you're suggesting, but it may not be necessary to go the trouble.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 14:38, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I have several comments on specific points, which I'll get out of the way first, but then I'll also have some much broader observations. One question I won't have anything detailed to say about, for now, is whether these two sounds are notable enough to have their own articles — though I'm somewhat inclined to think they are.

• My point about the difficulty of finding references had to do with references that don't target the redirect, but instead target the section within one of the transcluding articles. I actually first noticed this RfD because I followed a link that took me to one of those sections. Anyone who sees one of those sections, and wants to link to the subject of that section, would naturally figure that there wasn't a main article to link to and so they'd link to that section, or even to the whole transcluding article. In fact, links to redirects are routinely changed to what the redirect points to, a trend that would actively work to prevent links from going to the redirect. Furthermore, there's no way to prevent the templates from being transcluded by other articles besides the ones you'd intended, and no easy way (that I know of) to monitor the creation of such transclusions — do you intend to make it a regular part of your routine to check the what-links-here for the template every few days to make sure it isn't being used in some other article? Even worse, it's possible that the template might be used somewhere for a while, someone links to it there, and then that transclusion is removed, leaving a link to an article that doesn't contain the intended target material and no trail of links leading back to the template. One could spin out more and more elaborate scenarios for specific forms of chaos that could result, but the point is that there's a very simple way to avoid all of it, which is to put the material in mainspace instead of template space.
• Re sourcing: You can't be compatible with all articles that might use the template. Again, you don't have any real control over what other articles use it. If you use footnotes, the inline citations won't work in articles that don't use footnotes. If you use a different inline citation style, they will be incompatible with any article that does use footnotes — and naturally some helpful editor will come along and correct this, causing them to again not work in articles that don't use footnotes.
• Certainly, putting the section heading inside the template makes it easy to edit the template rather than the article (and I too agree, this was neatly done). That still doesn't answer the point about context, though. When an editor clicks on a section heading generated by the template, there seems a good chance they won't realize they're editing a template instead of a section of the particular article they were in, and consequently they may quite reasonably edit it in a way that makes sense in that article but not in some other article where the template is transcluded. In other words, the editor isn't editing what they think they're editing, which is bad.
• I'm uncertain what you mean by "given the limiting criteria I've presented above". I didn't notice anything in your comments that struck me as limiting criteria, and going back over them a third-or-so time, I'm still not seeing it. What did you have in mind?

My broader observation is that a distinction should be kept in mind between specific disadvantages of prose templates, and the broad-based objection that prose templates violate a long-standing and prominent guideline about the use of template space. In a situation where an argument is being made for an exception to a guideline of this sort, it seems to me that those advocating an exception need to show that (1) it would be a real hardship to comply, and (2) the reasons for the guideline are all obviously sufficiently answered by the particulars of the proposed measure. "Obviously" is a pretty strict standard, but I don't think it's inappropriate, because any decision made now could be challenged later, so the reasoning needs to be clear enough that only altered circumstances would allow such a challenge to stand a realistic chance of success. Hence, the reasons for allowing the exception should be self-evidently sound.

• If there's a case to be made for real hardship here, I don't see it. Duplicating the content in two different places is commonplace all over Wikipedia (as Michael Z. observed). With all the complications that we've already identified that would have to be steered around (even if these were the only complications involved), it seems that making a template solution successfully steer around them, and then too maintaining it, would be a lot harder that it would be to just comply with the guideline by putting the material in mainspace.
• Sufficiently answering all the reasons for the guideline is a good deal more than just answering the disadvantages that have been mentioned so far in this discussion. The discussion that led to the guideline was huge, as a couple of us have remarked. So keep in mind, as we discuss specific disadvantages of prose templates, that those particular disadvantages are only parts of a larger elephant.

Pi zero (talk) 15:28, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

It's only just registered on me (okay, so I was slow to catch on) that since the redirect from "Near-close central unrounded vowel" goes to the template, from the point of view of a reader of wikipedia there is an article about it — so either you believe the redirect should go somewhere other than the template, or you've already conceded that it's notable enough for its own article. Pi zero (talk) 17:04, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Pi Zero, I'm sorry if I wasn't clearer. The limiting criteria for prose templates are that they contain content notable enough to include on Wikipedia but not as independant articles and that the content is equally relevant or viable as sections in multiple articles. This starkly limits the number of opportunities to use prose templates because it's so rare for either of those situations to occur.

The situation with vowel articles is actually unique because the navigation template itself is unchangeable from the standard IPA vowel chart. Right now, for example, there is a Close central compressed vowel page that has existed for over three years and yet still doesn't show up on this navigation chart. Users are unable to access it on the navigation template, which makes it pretty awkward. We're thus compelled to turn this article into a section in another article (like we've done for the close front and back compressed vowels) not because it's not notable enough but because the way we navigate the vowel articles forces us to do so (and we haven't done so yet with the central compressed vowel partly out of my failure to notice it). Note that this doesn't prompt us to convert the article into a prose template because lip compression is more related to lip rounding than lip unrounding (i.e. only one of the criteria was met).

So while Pi Zero offers the hypothetical situation where one of the articles transcluding the template might have their citation style changed, that's simply not very likely to become a problem since the number of articles using a given prose template would have to be very low, making editing still very manageable.

Two things come to mind to remedy the situation of a user who does not realize they are editing a template. One is hidden text that shows up in the edit box. Something like <!--The content you are editing appears in multiple pages. Edits made will affect all such articles. -->. The specific articles could even be mentioned. As hidden content is often missed in the editing process, a more viable solution would be text that shows up in the template but not when transcluded. Such an editor is most likely going to see this text in the preview process. I've edited the template under discussion as an example of how this can work. Incidentally, this works pretty well in being clear which articles the prose template is intended for.

I'm confused by Pi Zero's recent point about "references" (do you mean wiki links?). If you're saying that some people might, in another article, make a link to close central unrounded vowel#near-close central unrounded vowel, i.e. a section which doesn't actually exist? Why is this a problem? Bungled sectional links happen all the time and users simply must scroll down. Keep in mind, again, that there is no slippery slope here. The creation and transclusion of prose templates is, at least under my criteria, a very restrictive process. I'd rather wait until someone actually improperly transcludes a prose template in an article it's not intended for before being Draconian in trying to protect against it. Sometimes such hypotheticals just don't pan out. This is why, for example, we don't protect pages against potential vandalism but actual vandalism.

This standard of "hardship" is a rather extreme measure of when to go against the template namespace guideline. What's wrong with simple difficulty? Consider the very realistic possibility of a prose template that prompts more frequent editing than the one under discussion, transcluding one template to multiple articles is not only easier because it streamlines the process of keeping the sections identical but ensures that the editing narrative is easily visible to all involved. Thus it's not just that there aren't disadvantages to using prose templates, it's also the case that it would be harder and more chaotic to put the material in mainspace and manage it in mulitiple articles. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:08, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Re: the IPA navbox situation: just because an article is not linked to from a navbox doesn't mean that it does not deserve its own article. You can simply add links to the article from relevant articles which are listed in the navbox. Navboxes exist to help us navigate around articles, but if we stopped creating articles because there wasn't a navbox for them, we'd have precious few articles! If you really must have a navbox, why not create a "Non-IPA vowels" navbox, or something similar?

I'm not going to get into the discussion about compatibility of references/citations, as I think that's a fairly minor concern and could probably be worked out. My main concern has still not been addressed, however: in what way does the text currently residing at Template:Near-close central unrounded vowel fail WP:V and WP:N so that it does not deserve its own article? Whether or not it is on an IPA chart is not a factor, so what is? Convince me!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:57, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Nobody is saying that it doesn't meet verifiability concerns. The reason for not having a separate article is threefold.

1. As I said above, the navbox format doesn't allow for additional vowels. It's not that there isn't a navbox for it, it's that the already existing navbox can't be altered to include it without a significant reduction in its simplicity and clarity.
2. The IPA has no dedicated symbol for this particular vowel as well as any other vowel not on the chart; in the IPA, vowels not on the official chart (such as raised, lowered, more or less labialization, and backness differences) are indicated with diacritics.
3. There's not just one acceptable way of representing the near-close unrounded vowel. As the prose states, there are three common ways of representing it. Two of them seem equally viable to me and the third appears in older literature and at least one dictionary. This puts a cramp in the desire to use the character of the vowel in question as a link in the navbox to its article.

While you have moved past this navbox and IPA issues, the latter is really a major criterion for article creation. The International Phonetic Association is, well, international; their authority is being appealed to here and appropriately so.

I feel like I'm making two cases here, one for prose templates in general and one for this particular prose template. Because this is a TfD, I'm reluctant to bring up {{Voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative}} and {{Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative}}, templates that I created this last weekend for the same purpose, though the slightly different justifications for them are even clearer than with the template under discussion. If people accept that it can be appropriate to use prose templates for putting the same content in two places (that is, given my criteria above), then I shouldn't need to elaborate on these templates and we can stick to talking about this particular one. If I've still got to make a case for prose templates in general though, let me know and I'll elaborate. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:22, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) I think we may have reached the point where we're just not going to agree on this. The way I'm reading your argument is that, since the IPA does not have a specific symbol for this vowel, therefore we should not have an article on it, despite the fact that it meets WP:N and WP:V. If I've misunderstood that part of your argument, please tell me, because as it is I don't find it convincing. In my mind, "meets WP:N" plus "meets WP:V" equals article, regardless of the IPA. (So call me narrowminded...) :)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:54, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Re notability (though I've got things to say about prose templates, most of which I'll leave for perhaps later today). I agree with Aervanath: having or not having an IPA symbol has nothing to do, one way or the other, with notability for an article. In relation to this, there was an earlier comment to the effect that the navbox cannot be modified without changing the IPA vowel chart. This isn't true, and may be closely related to the same misunderstanding — about how, and how well, wikipedia handles repetition of information in multiple places — that has led to advocacy for prose templates here. When information is relevant in two different places in mainspace, it is put in those two different places in mainspace. The supposed impossibility of adding non-IPA vowels to the navbox without messing up the IPA table is technically caused by the fact that the navbox is currently just a wrapper around the template for the IPA table — and that is really inappropriate, because the two serve different purposes. If the navbox were supposed to aid navigation around articles about the IPA, then it would make sense that it uses the IPA table, but it isn't: it's supposed to aid nagivation around articles about vowels, logically separate from whether those articles just happen to coincide exactly with the IPA symbols. When you go about trying to edit the navbox you shouldn't end up editing the IPA table, which is a close kin to the logical error when you go to edit one of these sections on near-front central unrounded vowels and end up editing something other than what you think you're editing (another thing I'll comment on later today... but I digress). If you edit the navbox, what you do should affect only the navbox; and there are separate buttons for accessing the IPA table that, besides being undesirable to even have there, are making the already-wide navbox even wider. The simple solution, conforming to the way overlapping information is handled on wikipedia, is to do an edit on the navbox template changing the transclusion of the IPA table to a subst, with an edit description that contains a wikilink to the template being substituted in (I'm fairly sure this satisfies the GFDL). The very first thing one then does is take out the buttons that provide access to the IPA template, and the whole navbox gets smaller. Then you can add whatever other vowels also meet wikipedia's notability guidelines, using whatever representations are deemed appropriate — one might use the X-SAMPA for the near-front central vowels, but then again one might prefer to just put in some placeholder like a question mark or something since not all notable vowels in the navbox necessarily have X-SAMPA representations either. You can see what it would look like here. And when the IPA table changes, someone will notice and update the navbox. Pi zero (talk) 13:20, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

• Subst and delete. I admit I haven't read through the lengthy discussion above, but essentially, this is the sort of thing templates should never be used for: article text should be included in the article itself, otherwise it's difficult for users to edit. This one is only transcluded in two articles anyway, demonstrating even less need for it. Terraxos (talk) 04:24, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

While I understand that the conversation above is intimidating, if you look through it you'll see that your concern has already been addressed and the method of editing the template is identical to that of an article's section. Try it if you don't believe me. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 06:31, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Concerning prose templates.

Although Aeusoes1 has been striving valiantly to introduce additional technical measures to compensate for various specific technical problems with the templates, those specifics are symptoms of much larger and more fundamental problems that I don't see have been effectively answered, and don't think can be effectively answered (though, of course, if I could see how to answer them, that would be part and parcel of having already been convinced). Here are two major factors either one of which I consider entirely sufficient to sink the idea of prose templates in this case. I make no claim that these are the only such factors.

• Editing that intends to make the two transcluded sections different. It isn't just that you can't prevent people from making edits to the section in one place that don't make sense in the other (I'll comment on that as a subitem), but that you shouldn't prevent them from doing so. I could go at this by trying to give examples where somebody might want to edit the section in one article in order to relate the material to that context, which could be a perfectly legitimate thing for someone to want to do and a genuine improvement, but for me to go into details of that would be missing the forest for the trees. By trying to impose the template one is (as Aervanath said about something earlier) going against the founding principle of Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Forbidding editors to separately customize the two instances of the section is just not cricket.

• Re the technical problem of making people aware that what they are editing is independent of the particular context in which they found it. (I don't feel it would be fair for me to drop this topic without feedback on efforts made in response to my comments.) Although Aeusoes1 has added a noinclude notice at the top of the template page, this message is likely to never be seen by someone editing the section. I made a non-substantive edit myself in order to test this: the notice is not visible while editing, not visible in previews, and not even visible when the page is displayed after the edit because the page aligns to the section heading rather than to the top of the page. The other technical measure Aeusoes1 suggests is to put comments in the code, but you'd have to put these under all three sectional headings, and I know from experience on other pages that this unwieldy solution doesn't work all that well either. I think what happens is that people go in very focused on the particular edit they want to make, so that they have tunnel vision for that particular part of the text; they're used to being surrounded by other more complicated stuff that they wouldn't understand anyway, so their minds simply filter out the surroundings. That's a charitable explanation of the behavior; it's a little harder to charitably explain the ones who make the edit and also delete the comment.

Again, although I'm providing feedback on this point to be fair, introducing still more complicated measures to further bolster the notification to the editor would be trying to solve the wrong problem, because the thing you're trying to notify them of should not be true.

• The hardship criterion.

• Yes, the standard I'm setting for justification of the template is steep. It should be. What's been proposed is essentially an IAR, and IAR only sticks if it's so obviously the Right Thing to do that people won't be forever challenging it — because, being an IAR, it can't stand up to serious challenges. And there's no point in letting something through that's sure to be overturned; a far more efficient use of everyone's time and effort is to be tough enough on it the first time that if it's weak it will die then, and if it survives then, it won't be easily overturned later.
• Aeusoes1 suggests "simple difficulty" as a justification for the template. But the use of the template, not to mention the (possibly unfinishable) preparation of the template, is complicated, a.k.a. difficult. Its whole purpose is to violate the organizational expectations that wikipedia works hard to nurture — nurture so that everyone will always know what to expect, making an environment that is predictable and therefore easy to work with. For example, all this effort to warn an editor that they aren't editing what they thought they were editing misses the point that they have a right to expect that they will be editing what they said they wanted to edit (by clicking the edit button on a section). Putting the material in mainspace — that is easy: easy to do, and easy for editors to deal with. One uses the standard wikipedia procedures for dealing with redundant information, which are straightforward, and which everyone is used to since they are used ubiquitously across wikipedia. Not only is difficulty not the extreme justification needed here, it is actually a solid argument against the template.

In my original point about references (by which I do mean wikilinks, yes), the central problem I was objecting to was that there isn't a central place in mainspace that everyone will link to. (Readers too benefit from having one such place, since they can recognize when they see a link that's to something they've already seen.) The template actively works to cause this problem — but although it can successfully confuse people looking at the sections generated by the template, it actually cannot fully prevent a primary location in mainspace: the primary location is whatever is pointed to by the redirect at "Near-close central unrounded vowel". That redirect cannot point to the template, because that would de facto make the template an article, as perceived by the reader; an article on the subject belongs in mainspace, and if you claim that there shouldn't be an article on the subject then you are claiming that the redirect must not point to the template. So instead the redirect should point to one of the sections generated by the template, and that section in that article is the primary location. And once you have a primary location in mainspace, it seems silly to go out of your way to deviate from the rest of the convention by not making the other section say that the one redirected to is the primary location.

(I'm skipping over a few side issues that at this juncture don't seem likely to matter.)

BTW, concerning the problem of not having a place to put some vowels on the navbox — that problem, regardless of whether or not we now see how to fix it, does not have any bearing on whether or not those vowels get their own articles. A problem with the navbox is a problem with the navbox, not a problem with the articles it is supposed to be a guide to: they get to exist if they're notable, and then the many minds that make light work on wikipedia get to figure out how to improve the navbox.

Pi zero (talk) 11:43, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

• Section variation is a compelling reason against prose templates, but the concern that one might want to "relate the material" to different contexts simply doesn't apply here. The sections of both articles have, do, and will stay identical to each other as long as the consensus is for vowel pages with identical formats and thus identical contexts. While it's possible for this to change in the future, it makes more sense to cross that bridge if and when we come to it rather than inconvenience ourselves for something that may not even happen. Because the setup is not permanent, we really aren't forbidding editors from doing anything so if this situation occurs, we can subst the template into prose, delete the template, and no one's feelings will be hurt.
• Per the technical problems, I also did a test edit and I see what you're talking about. I went ahead and moved the notice down into the first section, which will now make it clearer to editors. I know, I know, it won't solve the problem in all situations but I think it's a minor problem to begin with; the real-world manifestation of this is that someone might make an edit that needs to be undone or revised. Also, while this notice is partly designed to notify editors that they're simultaneously editing multiple articles at once, it's also designed to let them know which articles will be affected. We should not completely avoid violating editors' expectations (after all, this is what hidden comments do and those are allowed) but rather we should be careful in ensuring that when we do violate expectations that we're clear and accessible about the situation. I believe that the alterations I've made to the template help with this process but I don't doubt that there's more we can do about it.
• I don't understand how it can be more difficult to have a prose template, especially to editors involved in article maintenence. Let's pick a non-prose template, say {{Language phonologies}}, a template designed to navigate around Wikipedia's phonology pages. Now, imagine how difficult it would be if, rather than a template that was transcludable, it was a piece of each article that had to be edited every time a new phonology article was created. No matter if there are three articles or thirty, it would be more difficult to go to each article and make the proper changes than having a template would. It's the same with this prose template.
  • (By the way, this isn't so much IAR as a refinement of the existing rule. It's possible, to augment the discussion of this TfD with a proposal for policy change at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace. I agree with your overall point here, though.)
• Now I understand your concern about internal links. When wanting to create a link, users inevitably have to pick one article's section or the other's. Similarly, linking to the redirect inherently links to the template, which it shouldn't do if we are to maintain that it can't be its own article, and we can't make the redirect link to one or the other section without giving unequal preference of one over the other which then would mean one of my criteria hasn't been met. The indulgent solution I'd provide to reinforce my position would be to delete the redirect Near-close central unrounded vowel. People would then be forced to choose which section they want to link to, much like they would if there were two identical non-templated sections. This is more a natural result of an agreement to keep than a reason itself. As it stands, the fate of this redirect depends on our discussion so I say if we keep this template that the redirect should be deleted. Concern nullified?
• The navbox was one of three reasons that made the vowel not qualified for its own article. The major reason is that the International Phonetic Association, the body of experts in the field, doesn't consider it notable enough as indicated by both the lack of an IPA character as well as the lack of a uniform way of representing the sound. If I'm not incorrect, I believe the OED's use of <ɪ̵> is actually to represent a sound that is pronounced as schwa to some people, a close central vowel to others, and a near-close central vowel to still others (that is, the same phoneme pronounced differently by different speakers). I could be wrong, though, and perhaps kwami can clarify the matter.
• Okay, since I'm defending prose templates in general, I'd like to point out {{Voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative}}. This was originally a section of voiceless alveolar fricative but I noticed that some people were making edits like this and this that showed some confusion; because the non-sibilant alveolar fricative, although alveolar, was accoustically similar to the dental sound such that people were confused in thinking that Icelandic has dental fricatives. The solution I provided for this confusion was to make the alveolar non-sibilant section into a template and transcluded it in both articles. As with the near-close central vowels, alveolar non-sibilant fricatives are notable enough to include in Wikipedia but not as articles for the exact same reasons (awkward for navbox, no dedicated symbol, and no uniform representation) and the two places that I transcluded the template in have an equal relationship to the sound, albeit under slightly different criteria (one differs only by place of articulation and the other by manner of articulation). In short, the arguments I've made for the template under discussion apply for the non-sibilant alveolar fricative template which has the additional factor of users being confused when the section is in only one page. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 05:21, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to pass over some parts of your response to Pi zero and focus in on the notability issue, since I see it as the crux of the issue. You said:

The navbox was one of three reasons that made the vowel not qualified for its own article. The major reason is that the International Phonetic Association, the body of experts in the field, doesn't consider it notable enough as indicated by both the lack of an IPA character as well as the lack of a uniform way of representing the sound.

The argument that the IPA doesn't consider it notable doesn't hold water with me for the simple reason that the IPA criteria are probably different from Wikipedia's, and should therefore not be determining what we do and do not write about. We should only be following our own criteria here.

You also said there were three reasons this particular vowel did not deserve its own article. So far, you've listed two (the navbox, and the IPA's opinion that this is not notable), but I'm not sure what the third was. It might be helpful to address that one as well, since the two you've named so far have not been convincing for me.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 11:53, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

The three were navbox, no character, and no single way to represent. You say that the IPA's criteria "are probably different from Wikipedia's" but you've got it sort of backwards since the IPA is the group that we, as a community attempting to determine notability, may defer to the judgement of. They don't feel it's notable enough to have a character for this vowel (and it's not like they haven't thought about it), and they know what they're talking about. As far as I can tell, their criteria are the same as ours: notability. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 18:42, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree that we don't need to stick to the IPA. We don't for consonants. The difference is that there are no natural boundaries for vowels, which blend into each other. Practically no-one speaks of mid vowels as distinct from close mid vowels and open mid vowels, so three series of articles are not warranted. However, all three phrases are commonly used, and there is a technical difference, so separate coverage is warranted. Whatever we decide with this article will impact those as well. kwami (talk) 20:06, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

If this is indeed an article, it needs to be in article space, not template space. B.Wind (talk) 20:52, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) Comments, responses to Aeusoes1.

Regarding notability. Whether or not a topic gets a wikipedia article is a matter to be judged via wikipedia guidelines, not via any criteria that may be used by the IPA to decide which sounds should be assigned symbols. The International Phonetic Association is not in the business of developing a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and Wikipedia is not in the business of designing and publishing a phonetic alphabet for use in the study and practice of phonetics. Their different activities call for different kinds of decisions about different kinds of things; the fact that both may judge properties about a sound that could be described as "notability" only shows how broad the meaning of the word notability is. It is possible that, in the case of some particular sound, whether or not the IPA judges that sound worthy of its own symbol may coincide with whether or not Wikipedia judges it worthy of its own article — but the only way to determine whether those two different properties of the sound happen to coincide is to let the two entities judge the respective properties, and then see whether their judgments do in fact coincide. One should not decide whether to assign an IPA symbol to a sound based on Wikipedia's criteria for article creation, and one should not decide whether to create a Wikipedia article based on the IPA's criteria for symbol assignment.

Regarding prose templates.

• Re separate edits to the two sections. My phrasing may have caused misunderstanding: I was saying that one should not be trying to name specific reasons for wanting to make a context-dependent edit to the sections, because that misses the essential point, which is far more primordial. There appear to be two distinct reasons in my last comments why it is simply unacceptable to prevent separate edits to the two sections, and I'll add some further remarks here.

• The reason given under that bullet in the comments is that an editor working now does not have the right to deliberately impose a technical device whose purpose is to make it harder for future editors to try something different; that would be directly contrary to wikipedia's reason for existence. The second reason, appearing further down, is that the uniform face of wikipedia — that is vital to making it an easy, non-threatening environment for casual editors — requires that when they ask to edit a section, what happens is what they expect to happen, namely that they get to edit that section. On careful consideration these are perhaps just different views of the same thing: just become you can't think of any good reason for the two sections to be different, that doesn't make it admissible for you to place technical barriers against someone else who may come along and think of a good reason that you hadn't thought of. That is not the Wikipedian way.
• Consensus on the format for vowel pages? The contexts are different because the two articles are not about the same vowel; it has nothing to do with the format of the article (though you remind me that those articles need to be changed because they don't usefully address the presence of sections on other vowels further down in the article — they are currently in effect concatenations of separate articles that do not acknowledge each other, something I haven't been bothering to pursue since this discussion seems logically prior to it).
• Having stated categorically that we should not be trying to name specific reasons for wanting to make the sections different from each other, I will now cheerfully violate my own rule by pointing out that there is, in fact, an overwhelming reason why it is not acceptable for the two sections to be identical. The information should have a single primary location, because that too is part of the uniform way things are done on wikipedia, and if one of the two sections contains all of the material about the vowel then the other must not, but must instead give a link to the primary section. (Yes, I know I haven't yet revisited the question of primary location in this comment; I'll get to it.)

• The technical fixes are a losing battle; every small problem you fix will cause others to pop up. Moving the notice down means more accretion of extra cruft in the edit text, and to do it properly you would need to have three such notices, one just below each sectional and sub-sectional heading, because otherwise they'll only see the notice when they preview an edit of the whole section, not when they edit one of the subsections. Then too, an inexperienced editor probably won't use preview, so the notice won't actually get displayed where they can see it until after they've already committed the edit.

• It is a minor point because prose templates are not allowed, so that how you would mitigate one of the drawbacks of a prose template is moot.
• Yes, there is more you can do, and the more you do the more you intimidate the editor. The less you do the more you deceive the editor. You shouldn't be intimidating or deceiving the editor. There is a childishly simple solution, which is to not use a prose template.
• "I think it's a minor problem", you say, "the real-world manifestation of this is that someone might make an edit that needs to be undone or revised." If you are willing to do this work to undo or revise in a situation where you've gone way off the beaten track to impose a counter-conventional technical arrangement (a prose template), there's no reason not to do things in a conventional way, as they're done elsewhere, by putting content in mainspace, with whatever only-slightly-different undoing and revising is then needed. The difference is simply in which things take slightly more or slightly less work. In fact, if you do have two different sections in mainspace that are supposed to be identical — setting aside that I don't think you should — the obvious way to handle that is to put an HTML comment in each of the two sections asking editors to please coordinate the two. That's politely asking them to contribute further to the community, as an alternative to rudely telling them they can't, and it will encourage people to get involved with positive contributions to wikipedia. Don't imagine I'm talking about some trivial little feel-good moment: an editor making their first edit to wikipedia is the fragile seed of a potential future valuable registered wikipedian, and making their editing experience a positive one, for every single one of those newbie editors, is crucial to the future of wikipedia. Vast efforts like wikipedia succeed or fail on small percentage margins multiplied by large numbers of people. See also Butterfly effect.

• {{Language phonologies}} is clearly a navigation aid, not article content. The guideline we are discussing says "Templates should not masquerade as article content".
• Your limiting criteria aren't a refinement of the existing rule. The existing rule is unconditional with no refinement to be made, and this would simply contradict it. Also, your criteria aren't nearly as limiting as you seem to think (one of the issues I skipped over in my last comments). In the event, they would be capable of admitting vast numbers of similar cases, including but not... limited... to vast numbers of cases where editors could deliberately reorganize their material so as to induce a situation that would satisfy the criteria. Further, your criteria are not actually what we're debating here — believe it or not, we're actually discussing whether or not to delete a template — so very few of the contributors to this discussion have actually rendered an opinion specifically about your criteria, and any consensus we reach here will not be a consensus for those criteria. There would then be no limiting criteria, as the only limiting criterion anywhere nearby is the pre-existing guideline, and that would have been compromised.
• If a reader of wikipedia enters "near-close central unrounded vowel", they should be taken to a place where that information resides. If there weren't any wikipedia page under that name, then someone would and should create a redirect there. (In which case, as you say, one of your criteria hasn't been met.)

Lest we lose sight of the main chance here, I reiterate my specific positions on what actions should be taken.

• The template should be deleted.
• The content should have its own article.
• If the content is not given its own article, it should reside primarily in a particular section of a particular article, with other sections about this vowel identifying that particular section as the primary repository of information about it. If there is, in fact, absolutely no good reason to prefer the section of one article over the section of the other, flip a coin. (Of course, I don't think there's any need for this exactly because I do think it should have its own article.)

Pi zero (talk) 03:53, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Here is an addendum to one of my above points.

• The purpose of a prose template is to apply technical means to forbid a class of edits. It isn't possible to hide behind the idea that anyone can undo the use of the template, because it requires a technically savvy editor and raises a most astonishing hullabaloo, in which we are now engaged. (Contrast this with a vignette in which some passing editor makes a change to one of the two sections, someone reverts it with an edit description that identifies it as a good faith edit and politely explains that the two sections should be identical, and that's that. Or even more peacefully, someone else sees the edit, agrees with it, and makes the same change to the other section. Of course I don't think the two should be identical in the first place, but if they were identical, my point is that the contrast with this discussion is staggering.) Here's the kicker: The imposition of technical barriers against certain kinds of edits is a extreme measure that does not coexist well with the basic ethic of Wikipedia, and therefore it is only done for very special adminsitrative reasons and only administrators are empowered to do it. A prose template is a way for non-administrators to do an end-run around their lack of adminship, imposing a technical barrier against edits by others. Pi zero (talk) 15:12, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

I think this is getting rather circular, tautological, and repetitive. I suspect that we're talking over each other a bit. This seems to be the gyst of it:

1. Wikipedia says "no prose templates" but allows for an IAR exception.
2. IAR doesn't apply here
3. I have a proposal for a refinement of the existing rule.
4. Until/unless this refinement is accepted at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace (i.e. until the rules are changed), the current prose template is not allowed.
5. This means we should delete the template.

So, once the template is deleted we should then

• Put the information in one place. We can either
  • make the page into an article, in which case we change the navigation template the way Pi zero has here, although using IPA, not X-SAMPA. This would mean that the mid vowels could then (as kwami suggests) become their own vowels.
  • or we can have it as a section at close central unrounded vowel.
• (Whatever we do to this template we also do to {{Near-close central rounded vowel}}).
• Start a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace to revisit prose templates, which will then determine the fate of the two other existing prose templates (I'll do this no matter the determination of this discussion).

As much as I'd like to see prose templates used, I agree that this is not the proper place to change the rules. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 20:23, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

It seems that the only remaining question for this venue is where in mainspace the material should reside. I've just been browsing at Wikipedia:Notability, in hopes of enlightenment. It says

A topic is presumed to be sufficiently notable to merit an article if it meets the general notability guidelines below, or if it meets an accepted subject-specific standard listed in the table at the right.

With plausible very-narrow-subject-specific standard standing in for "the table at the right", I take this to mean that if a sound has an IPA symbol it's automatically notable for its own article, but lack of its own IPA symbol does not in any way diminish its notability under the general guidelines. The applicable passage further down would seem to be

If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.

I didn't see "lack of significant coverage" on your earlier list of reasons not to give the vowel its own article. Can we agree to give it its own article?

Pi zero (talk) 15:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

Template:Segaproject

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was delete --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 11:27, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Template:Segaproject (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

WikiProject Sega has become a task force of WikiProject Video Games, and all uses of this banner have been replaced with the WPVG banner. Thus, this template is orphaned and is no longer needed for use. Anomie⚔ 03:57, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

• Delete: no longer needed, no real historical value. Randomran (talk) 18:59, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
• Delete if it is no longer used anywhere. It Is Me Here (talk) 20:29, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
• Delete: Agree. If it is no longer used, then it is best to delete it. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:51, 22 November 2008 (UTC))

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.