Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 July 28

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July 28

Template:Infobox Austrian agency

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).

The result of the discussion was delete. (non-admin closure) ∯WBG^converse 08:00, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Infobox Austrian agency (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

10 transclusions; redundant to {{Infobox government agency}}. See the below section for most of the reasoning – tl;dr I'm not convinced by the text at the top of the documentation which claims that Austrian government agencies are special and need their own infobox. The Austria-specific instructions in the documentation could be placed in the main template, as I think some of them are useful, but other than that there's not much point in having another template for just ten pages. Jc86035 (talk) 17:04, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Delete; failed idea and lost cause. Template creator here. The template was meant to solve a problem that turns out to be unsolvable.

Wikipedia articles on the Austrian legal system are full of misinformation and hard factual errors; much of the existing text appears to have been written by Facebook lawyers who never read any of the textbooks and have very limited intuition for how the country works. Articles will misname statutes and offices, will confuse related statutes or offices which each other, will misclassify executive bodies as legislative ones, will anachronistically apply job titles to people in office before these job titles were established, will use bullshit Google Translate results for legal technical terms, and so on, ad nauseam.

Every couple years someone tries to fix things, gets reverted and barked at for their edits, and gives up. I studied a few old edit histories before I gave it a try myself; I tried to find out what the pitfalls were that created the friction that made people abandon their efforts, so that I would be able to sidestep said pitfalls. Two issues I thought I identified:

With respect at least to the articles at issue, Wikipedia tends to act as though Wikipedia pages outrank reliable sources, including standard textbooks, peer-reviewed academic papers, respected broadsheets, and actual statutes. You fix an error ("this is not how we talk about this concept in Austria; here are two books and a link to the bill"), you get reverted for the stated reason that Wikipedia precedent trumps usage in the popular media and the scholarly community ("nobody cares, it's how all our other pages do it").
Infoboxes are a particularly galling part of the problem. I talked about this aspect previously, here. Templates built by editors specializing in common law systems with Congressional or Westminster models of government are not always a great fit in all respects for a civil law system with a Kelsen-style constitution. The standard templates therefore contain parameters that are either meaningless or difficult to use correctly in an Austrian context. But editors of Austrian pages use these parameters anyway and inevitably use them wrong. Filling in blanks in infoboxes based on analogy with other articles is easier than doing actual research so that's what people do; it's only human. You remove a piece of misinformation ("not helpful in this context"), you get reverted for the stated reason that apparently all countries on Earth have exactly the same constitutional framework ("if it wasn't helpful it wouldn't be in the template").

Part of the way I tried to work around #1 was aggressively and proactively oversourcing things. Another part was not making corrections that have met with resistance in the past without preparing the ground first: write a bunch of related articles to establish precedent for correct, literature-supported usage; fix surrounding articles and templates that appear to support the error. Turns out this doesn't work because it runs into a Catch 22 too quickly. You traditionally can't fix errors in a widely used Austrian politics navbox because the fact that the navbox is widely used proves that it is great the way it is. But you also can't make the navbox less widely used because apparently the fact that the navbox is widely used proves that it is important and needs to stay widely used, and anyway why don't you just fix the template if you think it contains errors, lol trololo. (Hi StAnselm.)

The way I tried to work around #2 was to create an infobox that simply doesn't contain the most problematic parameters. Turns out this doesn't work either because editors will strenuously object to my use of nonstandard infoboxes. (Hi Colonestarrice.) In trying to discourage edit wars over individual line items, I ended up encouraging edit wars over the box as a whole. Awesome.

Eventually I just gave up. (This is my first edit since June 14.) It appears as though if you want to fix articles on Austrian legal topics you need to be the kind of person that enjoys fighting edit wars. Kramler (talk) 20:10, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Kramler: I'm not familiar with this topic area, but I suppose if you put instructions in the template documentation after the template is deleted, and editors continue to add incorrect data to infoboxes for Austrian government agencies, then my rationale is invalid (from your point of view, at least) and you should ask for a deletion review. Jc86035 (talk) 19:49, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Jc86035: It's an interesting idea, but I'm unlikely to go there. The way I see it, we already know that the template does not solve the problem it was meant to solve. I tried; I failed; it is unlikely the outcome would be different if I tried a second time. As long as Wikipedia does not accept that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, a large topic area with a large amount of well-entrenched, mutually cross-supporting bullshit cannot be fixed. Your logic is valid and your deletion proposal is appropriate. I never cared about the template as such − it was a means to an end − and you are not the problem. Kramler (talk) 20:48, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

delete after replacing with {{Infobox government agency}} per above. Frietjes (talk) 13:29, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

All clear. I went ahead and did the replacing for all 7 articles that were still using the template. Guess the box is ready to be nuked. Kramler (talk) 22:27, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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).

Template:Infobox Austrian government agency

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).

The result of the discussion was delete after replacing with {{infobox government agency}} Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 23:09, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Infobox Austrian government agency (talk · history · transclusions · logs · subpages)

Clone of {{Infobox Austrian organization}} with very little modification, which is currently being deleted after its own TfD. Colonestarrice, it's considered better to have one widely-used template than to have lots of similar little-used templates, because it makes maintenance easier. If you want to add something to {{Infobox government agency}}, then test it in the template's sandbox and then make an edit request. Jc86035 (talk) 14:00, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

delete, unnecessary fork, easily replaced. Frietjes (talk) 14:03, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
keep - The WMF isn't running out of disk space, so stop being counterproductive and disruptive. Several people that actually work on articles related to Austrian politics have agreed upon that the "government agency" infobox doesn't apply to Austrian ministries. That's why they created the "Austrian agency" infobox, but this template isn't correctly maintained and its design and structure is horrible and confusing. I did not overwrite the Austrian agency template because i had some issues with its creator, this is why i created the "Austrian government agency" infobox. Colonestarrice (talk) 14:33, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Colonestarrice: Couldn't you just edit {{Infobox Austrian agency}}? (See also Wikipedia:Ownership of content.) In any case, the points listed in that template's documentation for why it needs to exist aren't particularly convincing to me:
- The first point (length of names) could be solved with {{shy}} or {{nowrap}}, or by allowing the user to specify the infobox width.
- The second point (image size) is a bit odd because the standard template has a parameter for a logo and for an image.
- The third point (placement and labelling of officials) is meaningless because the Austria-specific template doesn't have any parameters which reference those positions, and the infobox is only used on ten pages anyway.
- The fourth point (documentation is useful) is a bit odd because you could just put that information directly into the documentation of the main template or on a WikiProject subpage.
- The fifth and sixth points ("less to type"; editor shortage) are red herrings because the blank template is copied and pasted regardless of how much content the editor adds; editors aren't obligated to add all of the information (again, this could be an instruction in the documentation of the standard template); and there are only ten transclusions anyway.
I'll nominate the other template for merging. Jc86035 (talk) 16:57, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per Jc86035, Frietjes, and the double precedent of {{Infobox Austrian organization}} and {{Infobox Austrian agency}}. Kramler (talk) 12:11, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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).

User:Barbara (WVS)/tv template

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).

The result of the discussion was relisted on 2018 August 7. (non-admin closure) ∯WBG^converse 08:05, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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).