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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by JulianDelphiki (talk | contribs) at 18:48, 27 July 2013 (→‎Edit request on 27 July 2013: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Temporal range

Automatic taxobox
Fossil Orontium wolfei
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Monocots
Order: Alismatales
Family: Araceae
Genus: Orontium
Species:
†O. wolfei
Binomial name
†Orontium wolfei
Bogner, Johnson, Kvaček & Upchurch

Would it be possible to have a line break inserted after "Temporal Range:" in the code? This would reduce the many instances of a actual range being presented on two lines like the example here.--Kevmin § 20:07, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The user can just include a <br> in the text parameter. {{Fossilrange|lower Eocene|Middle Eocene|<br>[[Eocene|Lower Eocene - Middle Eocene]]}} works fine. Perhaps the documentation for {{Fossilrange}} should mention this. Peter Brown (talk) 22:47, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Adding the Br code to the template would eliminate that need, and make the overall boxes more standardized, rather then having to run through hundreds of articles to add the code.--Kevmin § 02:41, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There are hundreds of other articles where "Temporal Range:" and the associated text fit nicely on one line and splitting things up would lead to an awkward appearance. Look at Gerobatrachus, where the line is just:
Temporal range: Early Permian, 290 Ma
Editors have created hundreds of taxoboxes without the line break? Perhaps, in many cases, that is what they intended. The ability to create the break has been there right along. If they did not use the facility, it's not up to those maintaining the template to declare that they were all mistaken. Peter Brown (talk) 03:16, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As a creator of at least 150 articles on fossil taxa, I can say that any bot for a time period that has a long name (eg Paleocene, Mississippian, Maastrichtian) or is from a longer time period, Carboniferous to Present, will have the split line display. Why should this NOT be fixed with a code patch to the automatic taxobox? I seriously doubt that a display like the box I posted (for an article I am writing now) is the way anyone is intending the temporal range to be displayed.--Kevmin § 05:10, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I don't see what is wrong with the taxobox you posted here. If the line had split before the en-dash that would clearly be wrong, but why is it wrong to split the line after it? I don't think this should be automatically "fixed" because, for me at least, it isn't broken. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:33, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Currently for me at least, the box displays as
"Temporal Range: Early Eocene - Middle
Eocene"
This is not a reasonable place for the break, and for longer names its at other positions in the display. If the display is changed so it shows as this it would solve a large portion of the randmoly placed breaks-
"Temporal Range:
Early Eocene - Middle Eocene"
This places the actual range all on one line with no change in taxobox size in a majority of cases.--Kevmin § 23:06, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
An alternative solution is CSS. {{Fossilrange|lower Eocene|Middle Eocene|<span style{{=}}"display: inline-block">[[Eocene|Lower Eocene - Middle Eocene]]</span>}} works fine, and it could be added to the template if consensus supports it. This is better than <br> because adding <br> to the template would add a line break to everything, even short lines that don't need one. The CSS only breaks after "Temporal range:" when necessary (where "necessary" means "there would be a line break anyway"). Gorobay (talk) 19:29, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Automatic taxobox
Fossil Orontium wolfei
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Monocots
Order: Alismatales
Family: Araceae
Genus: Orontium
Species:
†O. wolfei
Binomial name
†Orontium wolfei
Bogner, Johnson, Kvaček & Upchurch
Except in extraordinary circumstances, changes to templates should be so designed that they do not affect existing uses. Additional options are fine, but there is no way of surveying editors to see whether they agree to have the expansion of existing instances altered. There isn't even a suitable talk page on which to seek consensus on this sort of issue. That said, Kevmin is correct that there are a lot of taxoboxes with line breaks in inappropriate places. The documentation at {{Fossilrange}} should definitely be updated to say how to avoid this. Peter Brown (talk) 20:53, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, it doesn't break there for me. Can we define precisely where people consider a break inappropriate? Is it within a multiword period name? Controlling where breaks occur is a better approach than inserting a break as was first suggested. Peter coxhead (talk) 03:43, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

arbitrary editing break

Thats one of the reasons I suggested the line break addition. The current format means the line breaks at different places depending on teh monitor and display setup of the reader. A large portion of the odd braks could be avoided by moving the actual range data to the line below the "Temporal Range:" line. Doing that controls where the break appears in the majority of the templates and you dont have to try to figure where individual range entries are going to need a break. giving a display like the lower box.--Kevmin § 20:25, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Right now, we have:
On the proposal, we would get:
The additional line break would be useful in some cases. In others, no. Why not let the editors make the decisions, with appropriate information as to what the options are? Perhaps additional tools should be made available to facilitate browser-independence.
Peter Brown (talk) 22:12, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That structure is due to the fossil parameter being structured like this currently {{fossil range|275|275|[[Leonardian]] stage<br>([[Early Permian]])}}. The break was added by you on the 8th and prior to the break addition it was also displaying a bad break structure. If your manual break was removed it would have this structure
Other then the few examples like the one you made at Tetraceratops I don't know of active addition of breaks in the fossilrange structure. Simply removing your manual break and adding an automatic on to the template code is a much simpler solution. Why not implement, as I dont see it causing any problems.--Kevmin § 04:04, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Any problems? There will be some problems. I can certainly change the Tetraceratops coding as you indicate, but have you really looked at the wikitext of enough infoboxes to know that the number of perfectionist editors like me, who will think about line breaks and tinker until things come out just right, is so miniscule?
In my opinion
is preferable to
in that the former keeps the taxon's temporal range information together on one line, apart from the taxon's name. Of course, I will defer to any consensus about the taxobox reached at Talk:Hindeodus. Similarly, the appropriate place to discuss changes to the Limusaurus taxobox would be at Talk:Limusaurus.
I have adjusted font size in the examples above, which I specified incorrectly.
Peter Brown (talk) 16:12, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A look through the categories of two fossil groups Category:Ceratopsids and Category:Brachiopods show a high occurrence of bad line breaks int eh fossil range, and little to no effort to adjust the formatting of individual articles to account for this. Of the articles in category:Ceratopsids 20 have single line ranges, 14 have bad breaks, and one is not applicable. Category:Brachiopods is similar in ratio on single line vs bad breaks with 30 single line ranges and 28 bad breaks, however the category also hosts 25 fossil articles with no ranges at all and 4 articles that are recent genera/species or are not applicable. This shows that there is a significant problem, and there is very little to almost no effort to manually format to avoid the bad breaks.--Kevmin § 19:46, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Based on the sample, then, single line ranges outnumber those with bad breaks. Is there some way to distinguish the former in the template coding so that they can be left alone? Peter Brown (talk) 20:44, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
They do not outnumber the bad breaks by much, with the overall distributions being very close to 50:50. --Kevmin § 20:51, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I would oppose a change that increases the number of lines in the boxes of any substantial number of boxes. Half of the boxes with ranges is too many. Peter Brown (talk) 21:03, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I still have the problem that you haven't defined precisely what you mean by "bad break". The normal way to fix line breaks in the wrong place in web pages is to insert non-breaking spaces, not to force breaks where they aren't needed. For example, "Temporal range: Leonardian stage (Early Permian)" could be output as "Temporal&nbsp;range: Leonardian&nbsp;stage (Early&nbsp;Permian)" if the objection is to breaks within compound geological period names. I don't object to a break between "stage" and "(Early" – do you? Peter coxhead (talk) 21:10, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A bad break is a break that happens in the middle of geological names or in the middle of temporal ranges. For half of the boxes out there the box is already utilizing two lines and will no matter where nonbreaking spaces or the br code is placed simply due to the length the the information displayed. Another portion are not on two lines due to imprecise age data, "Cretaceous" as opposed to Turonian - Maastrichtian. I proposed the beak addition before the outputted data since half the boxes are using the two lines anyways, and the info doesnt have to be split up if id doesnt need to be.--Kevmin § 22:16, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't that solve the problem, though? Lower&nbsp;Eocene&nbsp;-&nbsp;Middle&nbsp;Eocene gives you just what you want without forcing a break after "Temporal range:", as follows:
Peter Brown (talk) 23:07, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
So you would much rather force editors into complex manual coding of the temporal range, rather then add a single instance of br code to the box code that solves the problem without 4 instances of nonbreaking spaces in the output???--Kevmin § 23:11, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Heavens, no! Can't the template add the instances of &nbsp;? I am very ignorant of template coding, but I know that they can be made to do all sorts of fancy things. It does, of course, have to be programmed so that it leaves a normal space before "(Early Permian)" and probably before numbers as in "269–252 Ma". I'm not prepared with detailed specifications, but this does seem a way of solving your problem while leaving Hindeodus and Limusaurus as they are. Peter Brown (talk) 23:29, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The template can't add &nbsp;, but it can use CSS to do a similar thing. See my previous comment, above. Use the {{{PS}}} parameter for notes like "(Early Permian)" or "269–252 Ma". Gorobay (talk) 01:41, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We should have paid more attention to you earlier! I don't understand your code but it works fine; let's go with it.
I don't understand the point of PS=, though; why not tack things on to the end of the "text to display" instead of using a different parameter? Peter Brown (talk) 03:37, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
My proposal is to edit {{Geological range}} to wrap {{{prefix}}}, {{{3}}}, and {{{PS}}} each in <span style="display: inline-block">...</span>. This will prefer line breaks between inline blocks to within inline blocks. The template just displays the contents of those three parameters in order. In order to get a preferred line break before "(Early Permian)", it must be in a separate inline block; that is why {{{PS}}} is necessary. So you put the first part ([[Leonardian]] stage) in {{{3}}} and the second part (([[Early Permian]])) in {{{PS}}}. Gorobay (talk) 13:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The template could quite easily be altered to add the CSS to produce a "non-breaking span" of text. However, I don't think there's a consensus for preventing all breaks in the way that you Kevmin wants. I'm opposed to forced breaks: they are a bad idea since they only produce sensible layout when viewed with a limited range of page widths and font sizes. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:54, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My proposed CSS does not prevent all breaks. It prefers breaks between {{{3}}} and {{{PS}}}, but if those parameters are too long it will still break within them. Gorobay (talk) 13:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Perfect. Agree. Peter Brown (talk) 15:46, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Illustrations: in my browser, Gorobay's use of "inline-block" yields:
with no break,
with one break, and
with two breaks. All I have changed between these is the text and the background color. Peter Brown (talk) 21:54, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Gorobay: apologies; careless wording on my part – the "you" above was supposed to be Kevmin. I've corrected my comment. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:44, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is there consensus to make this change to {{Geological range}}? Gorobay (talk) 23:06, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No-one seems against your suggestion, so be WP:BOLD and do it! Peter coxhead (talk) 02:14, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting a genus?

The genus Drymonema appears as a child of the family Cyaneidae. This is incorrect. I have attempted to change it's parent but it still appears on the page.LieutenantLatvia (talk) 03:58, 17 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a perennial problem, in my experience, with relying on the automatic display of child taxa. The list of child taxa has to be generated by a tool which is external to Wikipedia. Sometimes this seems to stop running and the list doesn't get updated, which is what is happening just now. I have edited the taxobox at Cyaneidae to say "see text" instead of the incorrect genera list. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:59, 17 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(Sorry I took so long to respond) Thanks. I don't really like the taxobox, it's pretty annoying sometimes. LieutenantLatvia (talk) 22:44, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We differ over the automatic taxobox, which I think is extremely useful in ensuring consistency. But I recommend explicitly listing child taxa; ideally I prefer to put "See text" here and then list and discuss in the text, since there are often differing views on which lower taxa are included in a higher taxon. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:23, 23 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Second conservation status

Like the other taxobox template, could we please add a second conservation status option, as seen in the article Sunda slow loris. I think it's important that we note not only a species IUCN status, but also their CITES status, particularly with how much illegal wildlife trade is going on. I tried adding a second status to the Gray mouse lemur article here and got this result. – Maky « talk » 00:29, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is an obviously good idea, but there are already problems with this template's consumption of resources. Ideally it would first be converted to Lua, as is happening with other templates. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:40, 25 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know anything about Lua and the template conversions. I take it this is a big thing and not likely to happen anytime soon? – Maky « talk » 05:22, 26 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For what Lua is, see Lua (programming language). Heavily used templates are being converted from the "Wiki template language" to the much more efficient Lua. For example, Module:Citation and its associated pages have been converted already (as shown by the use of "Module:" rather than "Template:"). I believe there is an intention to work on converting the automatic taxobox system. This would allow a number of improvements to be made, which at present are held up. As it's coded now, the system has a history of running into problems with resource usage, making it somewhat problematic to add more features. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:13, 27 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request on 27 July 2013

It looks as though the automatic taxobox is broken on many pages. Pages such as Finch and Sparrow have markup in the box when they should be in the html tag. Julian the Shadow | ( Talk | Contribs) 18:48, 27 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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