Forum:Why were citation templates deleted?

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I note that the citation templates such as {{DW}} and {{DWM}} have been deleted. I've looked for a few minutes for some sort of forum discussion about the matter, but haven't found any rationale or consensus for this deletion. And I've checked category:citation templates to discover that they are all gone. What was wrong with those templates? To my mind, they reduced the number of keystrokes needed to cite things, especially where multiple citations for a single point was necessary. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 21:16, December 4, 2010 (UTC)

I know that the DW template had some issues with creating a bunch of garbage non-desired links in the "most wanted" special age due to MediaWiki's improper handling of the "ifexist" construct, which the DW template used to determine if it needed to point to "the article" or "the article (episode)". -- sulfur 12:56, December 5, 2010 (UTC)

The discussion was on the template's talk page which has been deleted along with the template.

sulfur's got the gist of the discussion basically the templates were creating a lot of red links and messing around with the wanted pages list. There were some other issues also with the template that made it somewhat counter intuitive. --Tangerineduel 14:12, December 5, 2010 (UTC)

Well, as I've just got finished posting at Template talk:Discontinuity, the "redlink on wanted pages issue" is a non-starter these days. The average user cannot easily find Special:WantedPages, because the new skin doesn't even include a link to Special:SpecialPages. And how in the heck were those templates counter-intuitive? They were the easiest things in the world to use, as I recall, and saved a ton of keystrokes It was just {{DW|EpName|EpName|Epname}}. How's that counter-intuitive? (Oh wait, we don't have a forum thread where we can discuss that, because it was never discussed here, nor do we have the original template talk pages, where there was a development discussion. Bummer.)

You speak as if this was one template. But it really wasn't. It was a whole range of templates, a scheme of citation. Now, I didn't start Template:DW and the wider citation project, but as one of the people who spent hours getting all that to work — I'm more than a little pissed that you guys wiped out a whole class of template without even putting it up for discussion here. Deleting a page, fine, that can be discussed on a single page. But wiping out a range of templates, and not even leaving behind the code so that it might be adapted into something better, that's just dirty, dirty pool.

I find the rationale given here, in combination with your responses on Template talk:discontinuity, completely unacceptable. Just because something is, to use your word, "clever" doesn't mean you run away from it when it gives a tiny minority of users an obscure problem that the vast majority of users can't even see. A completely acceptable solution was given to you. You could have linked The Sensorites (TV story) to The Sensorites, if it bugged you so much. But no. You decided to trash a lot of work, all the history of that work, and even the discussions pertaining the extermintation of that work. Truly, I have never seen anything which more clearly fits the aphorism, "throwing the baby out with the bath water".

If this sort of situation ever arises again, can I suggest that you at least move the undesired template to something like Template:TemplateName/Archve, then delete Template:TemplateName so that people can't link to it anymore. But you'll at least retain the coding work that was done, so that it can be recycled and improved upon. Just because you don't understand something, and you hurl the word "clever" at it like an invective, doesn't mean that it's worthless. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 17:05, December 5, 2010 (UTC)

I'd prefer not to be attacked on this, while I have explained it I did not delete the template, I did participate in some of discussions concerning them, and on this forum page I just provided the information to build on what sulfur had already said (I really considered saying nothing, concerned that attack that might follow).

The wanted pages is accessible from the top of the Recent pages, it's also within the help pages for users to access should they want to help with something on the wiki, they're maybe not obviously useful but they are used to work out which pages might need creation or what pages might have incorrect links to pages. There's other uses for dedicated users along these lines.

The aim of removing the template was to make the wiki run more smoothly, as the users who created the template / maintained it were not currently editing on this wiki, it was an issue raised and then was addressed by the admins that edit on this wiki regularly.

Some things do bug myself and other admins and editors, some things like un-used redirects, which is why we likely wouldn't create the link you suggest, part of the behind the scenes stuff that the admins do is to clear up stuff like that.

Now I have, however un-deleted the template and the template's talk page, and moved it to an archive so it may be preserved as you've requested. You can find it at Template:DW/Archive 1 and Template Talk:DW/Archive 1. --Tangerineduel 07:30, December 6, 2010 (UTC)

Of course you'd prefer not to be attacked. We all would. I'd like it if you'd endorsed my usage of a bot from the off, rather than intimating that I couldn't be trusted with that kinda power. I'd have liked it if you didn't insult every damn coding effort of mine with the words "too clever" and/or "too complicated", as if it's a bad thing to try to save the user keystrokes. Don't portray yourself as an innocent victim, TD. When it comes to trying to change the wiki, you're a conservative and I'm a liberal. There's going to be blood on the dance floor. But I think you understand I'm attacking your views forcefully, not you personally, just as I accept your overriding desire to make the wiki run smoothly.

Still, you're right to fear my wrath this time, because you know — you really must know — that the way this was handled was wrong. I've seen you time and time again tell people to move certain discussions to the Panopticon so that the profile of those discussions could be raised. And it was always possible to leave me a message; I've been checking my user talk page regularly, even if I haven't been actively editing for the past few months. If you had just dropped me a line, I could've told you what sulfur said above. He told me about the "redlink in WantedPages issue" eons ago, but frankly I just didn't think it was that big a deal. I was focused, as I always have been, in making changes that reduce the number of keystrokes for the average user. Okay, so two admins trawl WantedPages and look for things to do, but I'd argue that's not particularly normal editing behavior, especially not now with the new skin. Thus balancing that behavior against a newbie's desire to find the easiest way to edit things made your issue completely unimportant.

Even so, I find your objection to creating linkage between The Sensorites and The Sensorites (TV story) completely unreasonable. You want to get rid of a helpful redirect why, exactly? Seriously, you don't give any explanation for why you fear that except that "some things bug us". That's not a reason. That's little better than just saying, "Because". Moreover, it's really an excuse not to do a little work. I bet, though, that the work you or Doug spent in deleting these templates, their talk pages, their doc pages, and their inline usages would've been about equal to just creating the redirects and keeping the range of templates in place.

As to your other objection, the intuitiveness of the template, well, you're again not looking at it from the new user's standpoint. I've argued this forever and a day, now, but new users will and do think that Castrovalva means the television story. And more experienced users sometimes forget the disambig. And people sometimes create pages before the episode airs, so they don't even know a title like The Pandorica Opens refers to an object in the Whoniverse, so they don't disambiguate the episode title until it's got loads of links created to it. (Ironically, I seem to recall that even you, for a moment, questioned whether "The Pandorica Opens" was actually the name of the painting, thus requiring the episode to be moved to The Pandorica Opens (TV story).)

Even the best editors we have simply don't cite stories correctly, 100% of the time. That's just what happens when the naming policy itself is counter-intuitive.

Still, I accept that you're always going to uphold the policy which is creating this whole problem in the first place. If story names were given precedence, we wouldn't have any difficulties with this template, or with people mis-citing stories. Thus a template which frees the user from having to make that determination is a good thing. You say it's counter-intuitive, but it represents a way that a person, regardless of their editing experience, can always cite what they mean to cite, without having to do anything other than remember how to properly spell a title. At the point I sustained injury to my hand and had to stop typing for a while, the template didn't yet address the reverse kind of individual, like yourself, for whom the (TV story) nomenclature is now second nature. But that could have been addressed, if you'd just asked.

If you had asked, I would've immediately told you that these redirects weren't useless: instead, they solve everything. Don't you see? If every non-disambiguated story (that is every one like The Sensorites) has a disambiguated redirect (The Sensorites (TV story), then all the titles are linkable by a single format (Name (TV story)), even if some of the actual page names are Name and some of them are Name (TV story). I was working on a way to get the bot to do the redirects more quickly at the time I injured my hand. Had I finished, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, because the template would've stopped spreading its redlinked detritus in WantedPages.

Instead, you hid your argument away on a template talk page, where almost no one would find it. Basically, you had a conversation with Doug and then he scrapped it. I do note with genuine gratitude that you argued against completely trashing Template:DW – as well as your recent return of Template:DW — but it's clear Doug was set on deleting the whole range of templates from his first post. He was clearly against not just one page, which is what template:proposed deletion is for, but an entire concept.

Thus, that wasn't a valid deletion process, as far as I'm concerned. It was the removal of multi-template scheme started and worked on by three non-admins, just because two admins had a rather obscure objection to it. And then it was the quiet burial of that flimsy deletion argument by the admin who was never prepared to even discuss keeping or reforming the template. The discussion between you and Doug doesn't even include closure of any kind. I do get the sense that you were perhaps slightly surprised that he just went and deleted them all with abandon, because he never addresses your repeated query to archive them in some way. Still, it's not like you at any time suggest bringing other people into the discussion.

So how am I supposed to be cool with such a lamentable abuse of admin powers? If this were Wikipedia, you guys would've been de-adminned for this so fast, you wouldn't have had time to write a rebuttal. As it's not Wikipedia, though, all I can do is note the score: Admins 1-0 Consensus. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:18, December 6, 2010 (UTC)

Not just admins trawl the wanted pages, it's a valid way for new users who wish to contribute and to add new pages. With a lot of the wanted pages having information elsewhere on the wiki, it can just be a process of collection and editing. It is a useful tool, not just for admins.

The creation of the (TV story) link is only helpful in the situation of the template.

This wiki has quirks with the naming conventions as do other wikis.

Everything links on a wiki using the square brackets, but with this template that rather simple idea is then altered to be everything links on a wiki with the square brackets except the stories. I can edit across the whole wikia.com and the form of using the square brackets to link anything is there and then there's a template here which doesn't follow this. Yes you can still use the square brackets to link stories but then there's two systems to link stories. I don't think the template frees the editor, I think it adds another level of complication, it's fairly understandable that anything in the curly brackets creates am infobox, or something big and colourful like the nav-boxes or the stubs anything within the {{ does these sorts of things (yes the ext links are just text but they're outside of the regular wiki stuff, they're "external links"). This isn't exactly doing either of these which adds to a complication.

I didn't actively hide the template discussion, in fact I didn't really think about it, the discussion started out specific to that template but snowballed from that one. I also really didn't mean anything by the 'clever' comment I just meant it in humour to try and keep the template in some form without the complicated bits that were making problems. A lot of the time the admins do make mistakes like editors sometimes it is by not thinking and just focusing on the end goal, this is like many things a learning experience.

You're right this isn't Wikipedia, in amongst the other things that was stated by Wikia Central with this new skin change over is that Wiki.com (and those under its wing) are not Wikipedia. There are less hoops to drag ourselves through, there's more leeway, we're also more likely to make mistakes and fewer people that will crash down on users when we do make mistakes. I for one don't want this wiki to be completely like Wikipedia. I'm sure you know about the Doctor Who project on Wikipedia which exists within the bounds of the Wikipedia's sphere of control. --Tangerineduel 07:17, December 7, 2010 (UTC)