Template talk:NCES School ID

Schools Template‑class

	Schools portal This template is related to WikiProject Schools, a collaborative effort to write quality articles about schools around the world. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.SchoolsWikipedia:WikiProject SchoolsTemplate:WikiProject Schoolsschool articles
Template	This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I don't like the fact that an editor has to supply school_name and access_date, but I can't see how to automate those. the name would require fetching the title of an external web page and storing that. The date I could not figure out how to persist other than the example code given.

Otherwise, I think I did OK for my First Template!--Arg342 (talk) 11:11, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The rationale behind the need for this is that 1) The NCES CCD website contains a great deal of useful statistics on nearly every US school. IMHO, this information is perfect for a school article's {{infobox school}}. 2) In order to be useful, many reference citations are needed in an article that uses these statistics. See Hommocks Middle School for an example. 3) Since the citation is to a website where part of the URL is driven by the ID number, it is not unlikely that over time the form of the URL would change. Given this I feel it is best to put the URL in a single template, rather than have the URL in each individual article. If the form of the URL should change, only a single change to the template would be required to correct the links in hundreds or thousands of articles.--Arg342 (talk) 12:05, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So this would supplement the info box, which would now have less info it it? It wouldn't duplicate it, right?

You might list an example. Student7 (talk) 12:45, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This would be used mostly in an infobox. The infobox would not necessarily have less in it... I guess an editor could just give the ID number and a link and let the reader follow the link to see the data. But I had envisioned that the data would be copied into the infobox as {{infobox school}} currently invites. When data was copied in, the idea was that there would be an easy way to tag each piece of data with a named ref tag. See Template talk:Infobox school#Suggestion for new entry for USA schools: NCES School ID for a discussion what led up to this. For two different examples of usage, see Hommocks Middle School for typical infobox usage as I had originally thought of it, and Martin County Schools (North Carolina) for a different usage that occurred to me last evening. Thanks and feel free to ask more if this is unclear.--Arg342 (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]