Wikipedia talk:Hatnote

Hatnote use for biography title clarification

So I recently noticed an issue with Template talk:Family name hatnote#Extraneous links which led to the discovery how this whole class of hatnotes is not really documented in the WP:HAT guideline since over a decade ago, and it's not clear which parts of the current guideline text are supposed to apply to them at all.

Since the previous few discussions about this at the village pump and at this talk page were never properly decided, I suggest we have a WP:RFC for it here. Does anyone see a better venue for this? --Joy (talk) 20:16, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

RfC for what, exactly? What is the question to pose?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:27, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish as I said above, to what extent is the hatnote guideline supposed to apply to these anthroponymy hatnotes? Right now the guideline mentions something at WP:HATFAM but only footnotes, not hatnotes, which doesn't really match the reality. This in turn links to a pretty odd text in the template documentation that sort of just describes a lack of consensus. That is just not an actual guideline. --Joy (talk) 14:54, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

"Hatnote" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Hatnote has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 September 1 § Hatnote until a consensus is reached. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:36, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Re-resurrection of italicization question

Searching for an italicized title. Normal text in results list, italics in the "containing" search.

The issue of italicized italics in hatnotes which are already in italics was discussed in 2017 and again in 2019. I've just found those discussions now, as I don't watch discussions on this page. The 2019 discussion led to the introduction of the Wikipedia:Hatnote § Hatnotes with italics in the links section by SchreiberBike on 28 August 2019 (diff).

A couple of reasonable objections to this convention were raised:

• The point of the italics in the hatnote is to show that it is not part of the actual article, so any other formatting is confusing. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 23:56, 10 April 2017 (UTC)
• In my IRL work I used to take the un-italicize route, but at some point I decided to looks weird, and I began to underline, like this:

"Spotted angle" redirects here. For the other butterfly with this common name, see Caprona alida.

I'm not going so far as to recommend that for use here, but just thought I'd throw it out. EEng 11:04, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree with both of those points – it's debatable whether the "non-italic" formatting is confusing or helpful, and it looks weird. In addition to those issues, I'll add my own.

The purpose of hatnotes is navigation. They are a part of the tools readers use to find articles. The main tool they have is the search box. Observe the example search I uploaded. A reader searching for the Abaratha alida article just types "Abaratha alida" into the search box. They are not required to type the name in italics. Indeed, if they try to italicize the title in the search box, they run into trouble:

The page "''Abaratha alida''" does not exist. You can create a draft and submit it for review, or you may create the page "Abaratha alida" directly, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

The list of search results shows all results in normal text. It does not distinguish titles which are italicized from those which are not. Then the "Search for pages containing" link always italicizes the title which to search for in pages. It doesn't "non-italic" the title to search for pages containing the italicized title. In short, the convention for use of italics in search is different from the convention used in the bodies of articles.

Italics in hatnotes can cause false-positive population of Category:Missing redirects, a category I patrol. This is why I've started this discussion today. The hatnote on Nocturnes (Debussy) is populating this category, because of the use of "non-italic" in the hatnote:

"Trois Nocturnes" redirects here. For other uses, see Three Nocturnes.

The problem is that no, ''Trois Nocturnes'' does not redirect to there. Trois Nocturnes, in plain text, is what actually redirects there. Italics do not work inside Wikilinks. They must be placed outside the Wikilink to work properly.

This problem also came up recently at Interdiction of MV Matthew, where, after conflicting with Tamzin, I resorted to creating a custom {{hatnote}}, to avoid the issue. This compromise means that the page has been removed from the hatnote patrol, making it more vulnerable to potential future vandalism or other issues that the hatnote might have detected.

Issue goes back to my August 2015 RfA, where there was concern about I redirect I created in order to accommodate a Chinese character in a hatnote:

This leaves four which might be considered problems. Two of these were redirects: ''唐山'' was deleted following Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 November 20#Several redirects that have wiki markup in their titles;... --Redrose64 (talk) 11:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Redrose. I created ''唐山'' because an editor was quite persistent in insisting that Chinese characters should not be italicized in hatnotes. I would have been happy to have simply removed that foreign-language "redirects here" hatnote, but they insisted on keeping it. So, my compromise kludge was to create that redirect to keep the page out of the "flagged for maintenance" category. I was quite happy to see the redirect finally come off that page, which in turn made my work-around unnecessary. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:16, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

For the reasons given above, the section Wikipedia:Hatnote § Hatnotes with italics in the links should be removed. wbm1058 (talk) 14:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• I'm not understanding what the problem is? Italics work fine in hatnotes, using '' outside links or making use of the {{!}} template when piping is needed (e.g. when only part of the title needs to be italicised. For occasions when it's the "redirects here" that needs partially italicising then just use a custom hatnote template (or someone more skilled than me can create a new standard one). When items that would normally be italicised occur in otherwise italicised text the standard is to deitalicise it, and other than your personal dislike of that I'm not seeing any reason to deviate from that standard? Thryduulf (talk) 18:53, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• While, as one of the people writing code for hatnotes, italicization is annoying, I think I generally lean towards including it, and largely agree with Thryduulf.

  Where I diverge from Thryduulf is that I'd prefer to not either use custom hatnotes or change the behaviour of {{redirect}} and similar: when we display the redirected title, we are mentioning title text (a string that is recognized by MediaWiki), and not an actual title (a name for a specific subject), therefore we should not (de)italicize in those cases—a razor-sharp semantic distinction, to be sure, but it seems reasonable to me. I can probably add an option so that you can do something like {{redirect|Foo|redirectmask1=Bar}} to specify italicization, but since I disagree with the semantics, I don't want to write it unless we get a consensus that it's preferred.

  Longer-term, I wish we'd get a way to pull the title content of {{DISPLAYTITLE:title}} via something in the mw.title Scribunto library (without, you know, transcluding and pattern-matching the whole page for the DISPLAYTITLE declaration) so that I could automate away having to manually specify italics most of the time, but that's a whole other suggestion. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 23:38, 10 November 2023 (UTC)