Template:Vital article link/doc

For any article, the template displays its current vitality level and helps to locate it in the vital list.

The main purpose of this template is to assist the participants of the WP:Vital articles project with page nomination discussions happening on the project's talk-pages. It can be also used on individual user pages to track statuses of particular articles. The template should not be used in articles themselves.

Usage

Usage: {{VA link|article name}}.

Example: {{VA link|Nikola Tesla}} → Nikola Tesla  3

Description

This template produces a formatted link to a vital article. It takes a single unnamed parameter which is the name of the article. The output consists of the regular link to the article followed with the article's level (from 1 to 5) linking to the corresponding Wikipedia:Vital articles subpage containing the article.

Only the link to the top-level list is displayed. For example, if the article is of level 3 vitality, then it is present in level-3, level-4 and level-5 lists, but only the link to the level-3 list is displayed (1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5).

If the article is not a vital article, then the output is just the plain link. (This is useful if the template was previously used for an article which was subsequently demoted from the vital list.)

The first letter of the argument is automatically capitalized before being checked for being vital. So both {{VA link|water}} and {{VA link|Water}} should produce the same result: Water  2.

More examples

Code	Result	Notes
{{VA link|philosophy}}	Philosophy  1	Level 1 article, "1" links to the only section in the level-1 list. The first letter is automatically capitalized.
{{VA link|Nikola Tesla}}	Nikola Tesla  3	Level 3 article, "3" links to the "Scientist and Inventors" section of the level-3 list.
{{VA link|Rishikesh}}	Rishikesh  5	Level 5 article, "5" links to the "Northern India" section of the "Geography/Cities" sublist of the level-5 list.
{{VA link|sand cat}}	Sand cat	A non-vital article.
{{VA link|non-existing-article}}	Non-existing-article	A non-existing article.

Usage in headers

This templates, and other templates, should not be used in section headers, per MOS:SECTIONHEAD.

The template could hypothetically be used in Vital article nomination discussions, for example:

=== Remove {{VA link|Water}}, add {{VA link|Ice}} ===

produces:

Remove Water  2, add Ice  4

The downside to this use is that when you try to edit such a section on the desktop (with [edit] button), the automatically generated edit summary will contain something like /* Remove {{VA link|Water}}, add {{VA link|Ice}} */. This does not produce a valid link to the discussion section in the talk-page edit-history. To mitigate this problem, an editor would need to manually copy the section header's title from the preview and paste it into the edit summary: /* Remove Water 2, add Ice 4 */. Then it would link to the proper section.