Template talk:Infobox station: Difference between revisions

Template:Infobox station is permanently protected from editing because it is a heavily used or highly visible template. Substantial changes should first be proposed and discussed here on this page. If the proposal is uncontroversial or has been discussed and is supported by consensus, editors may use {{edit template-protected}} to notify an administrator or template editor to make the requested edit. Usually, any contributor may edit the template's documentation to add usage notes or categories. Any contributor may edit the template's sandbox. Functionality of the template can be checked using test cases.

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Infobox station template.

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Trains: Stations Template‑class

Trains Portal This template is within the scope of WikiProject Trains, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to rail transport on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. See also: WikiProject Trains to do list and the Trains Portal.TrainsWikipedia:WikiProject TrainsTemplate:WikiProject Trainsrail transport articles Template This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Associated projects or task forces: /  This template is supported by WikiProject Stations.

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox Ireland station on 2014 December 29. The result of the discussion was "merge Template:Infobox Ireland station and Template:Infobox Ireland disused station into this template".

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox Deutsche Bahn station on 2015 February 8. The result of the discussion was "merge Template:Infobox Deutsche Bahn station into this template".

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox Paris metro on 2015 February 8. The result of the discussion was "merge Template:Infobox Paris metro into this template".

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox China station on 2015 February 8. The result of the discussion was "merge Template:Infobox China station into this template".

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox Japan station on 2015 May 9. The result of the discussion was "merge Template:Infobox Japan station into this template".

This template was considered for merging with Template:Infobox T&W Metro station on 2015 June 11. The result of the discussion was "no consensus".

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Could you please add zh-Hans-CN, zh-Hant-TW and zh-Hant-HK to the list of languages that don't get emboldened? These are common language codes on Wikipedia and more accurate than their zh-Hans/zh-CN etc counterparts. Many thanks Danielt998 (talk) 21:54, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Done * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 22:18, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Pppery: Given that the proposed merge is one-way (it would not affect existing uses of this template), is having the TfD notice necessary? It's not a big deal, but it seems unnecessary especially given how widely used this template is. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 03:52, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's no consensus I can find about when it is appropriate to noinclude TfD tags (the instructions only mention it [f]or templates designed to be substituted, so I generally err on the side of more notification, and only do so for extremely highly-used templates like {{sidebar}}. Of course, another template editor or admin is free to noinclude the template, and you could open a {{edit template-protected}} request to do so, which I would refrain from answering. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:16, 26 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The traffic section looks a bit messy to me. I had an example in my sandbox, but that's been deleted, but my point is that we only use the traffic section for passengers currently it seems (not freight), so repeating passengers for each row along with the year seems unnecessary. Perhaps change the heading to "Passengers" and omit the word on each row instead, so each row doesn't span two lines. The repetition is a bit distracting. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:23, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• I think renaming the section is fine. Changing the row display is slightly tricky because {{Rail pass box}} handles the passenger display. Mackensen (talk) 11:50, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• See Template talk:Rail pass box#Change in passenger display. Mackensen (talk) 12:12, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks for making that! I've responded there. On the tangent note of freight, I wonder if it would be interesting to have parameters for being able to display freight traffic, it does seem to be a thing I guess. Though the data is probably less interesting than passenger totals for many stations, I guess for some stations it could be interesting and useful. But I don't know enough about trains/stations to know, and that's beyond the scope of my passengers label request here anyway; just an interesting sidethought I had. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:37, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  It's a thing, but I don't think we generally capture that data on Wikipedia. We have very few articles about freight-only stations, and few if any operators publish freight data for individual stations/terminals. Getting passenger data is difficult enough :). Mackensen (talk) 14:17, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Sandbox updated to show the revised passenger handling: Template:Infobox station/testcases#Bern. Mackensen (talk) 16:54, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Looking at it, I feel rather indifferent about it. The issue I was trying to address (now that my sandbox is undeleted) is: Special:Permalink/968998076. Some areas report statistics as 2017/18 for example (at a quick search, I can't find a definition that would narrow this down to something shorter), so it spans two lines, and then that looks ugly. At the same time, the testcase looks slightly ambiguous at first glance. So I'm not sure? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:04, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  I've changed the example so that the benefit from wrapping is a little more obvious. Mackensen (talk) 17:38, 30 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Hmm, that is exactly what I was getting at, but seeing it live I have a mixed feeling on both the before and after. Something just feels slightly off, wonder if it can be designed even better, but not sure. What are your thoughts? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:40, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  One thought that I have, though it relates to the other box, is that "rank" could perhaps be dropped altogether. It's awkward if you list multiple years, it's semantically invalid as implemented, and a lot of transit systems don't publish ranks in the first place. In the case of the current example, it's misleading at best. I think it's true to say that there are ~1700 stations in Switzerland, but the dataset in question includes numbers for about 900 of them--those owned and served by SBB, plus the Rhaetian Railway, MGB, SOB, Zentralbahn, and others. Also, the figures are rounded and averaged, and no station has a lower average daily figure than 50. Mackensen (talk) 18:56, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Sounds like a good idea to me (or at least a different way of displaying it, so it's not using up its own row), though I don't really know enough about the range in station articles to have the most useful opinion here. Hopefully some more editors can join in with comments. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:14, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Following a TfD on the merge of various UK stations templates, I've begun work on setting up wrappers for them to make sure we get everything useful in. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:38, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wrappers:

• {{Infobox GB station/sandbox}} (testcases)
• {{Infobox UK heritage station/sandbox}} (testcases)
• {{Infobox UK disused station/sandbox}} (testcases)

Course, we need to make decisions on a few parameters/pieces of functionality, and some implementation details should be noted, so I figure I'll start a discussion here for continued input.

Missing parameters:

• pte: Passenger transport executive
• gridref: Ordnance Survey National Grid

(every difference which may require external action will be enumerated, for the sake of avoiding surprises and catching nitpicks)

• {{Infobox GB station}} supports 12 historical year/event entries, this template supports 11. No change required, since no templates are actually using the 12th.
  • {{Infobox UK disused station}} supports 16 of them, but only one uses more than 11 (it uses 12). We can move "Opened" to the proper opened param, then it'll only have 11, problem solved ;) -- so no additional history params required here either. edit: added a years12/events12 param to account for the usage at Foryd railway station
• {{Infobox GB station}} supports an "other name". According to the documentation this is meant to be used for "Welsh/Gaelic/etc" names, these cases we can safely map to native_lang (with some format adjustments, and bot can interpret the template used to fill in native_name_lang), but de facto this param is 'abused' to use a literal other name (in English) for stations (eg at Newcastle railway station). These alternate names should probably be removed by hand, but there's no harm to just carrying them over and having them be fixed later. It would be improper use, of course.
• {{Infobox GB station}} has two place parameters, |locale= and |borough=. The testcase merges this into borough, per documentation here. In many cases, the values are awfully similar (eg see testcase for Manchester Piccadilly), so I'm not sure why the values are duplicated. Ideally, one value should probably be trimmed, since it looks clumsy. (e:) For the sake of merge, they're just combined into |borough= as comma-separated, as is typically done in this template.
• {{Infobox GB station}} has an extra 'passengers' value for 'interchange' numbers. These rows are prefixed with "– Interchange", and often repeated per year entry. We'd need to add support to {{Rail pass box}} to retain custom labels to keep these, although it does beg the question, do we need interchange figures in the infobox?
• The designation grade is given as a wikilink (eg [[Grade II listed]]). Bot will need to strip these into valid values for {{Infobox designation list}} - trivial find/replace.
• Usages of these templates often give the opening date as a year/event value, rather than use their own start param. Not a problem, a simple map will retain the view as exists, but for proper usage of this template those values should be remapped. A bot could do this pretty easily, by checking if |events= (ie events1) contains "Opened", but eh.
• These templates link to external boxes to enumerate letters for UK railway stations. We can still support this using embedding, probably, but I believe TfD consensus was going towards it not being necessary, so perhaps it should just be omitted?
• {{Infobox GB station}} has interesting functionality for tracking categories where passenger numbers aren't updated for a year. Effectively just: {{#if:{{{usage1415|}}}{{{lowusage1415|}}}||[[Category:UK stations without latest usage statistics 1415]]}}{{#if:{{{usage1516|}}}{{{lowusage1516|}}}||[[Category:UK stations without latest usage statistics 1516]]}}{{#if:{{{usage1617|}}}{{{lowusage1617|}}}||[[Category:UK stations without latest usage statistics 1617]]}} -- I'm not yet sure how/if we want to replicate this. There are a number of ways to do this, should we wish to keep it, ranging from luaification to bot runs.
• Testcase note: Passenger lists are not complete. I haven't added every single mapping for the years yet. For a better idea of how it'll look, look at the Manchester Piccadilly testcase, which has more rows filled.
• Infobox structure: See testcase for GB infobox, mainly the differences between the two in terms of headers and how labels are 'categorised'. Can/should we organise the labels differently in this template? That template seems to structure better (eg into location, operated, etc)? Effects on other countries' templates should be considered.

Regarding passenger numbers, many articles will have data going back to 04ish, but with anything before the last five years commented out. There have been discussions in the past about some sort of chart, but no one could quite work out how it should be displayed. Also of note that some stations which are now closed may have stats but for 10 years ago. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:21, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have some questions on the "merge notes" above.

1. Please do not move "Opened" to 'the proper opened param', we have been trying to go the opposite way for some time - moving them to the initial year/event pair. Having a dedicated "Opened" parameter is OK if a station opened once, has stayed open ever since and kept its name throughout, but if it was ever closed and reopened, or was renamed at some point, it is desirable to have consistent presentation.
2. On no account should locale and borough be conflated. They have different purposes, and there are comparatively few cases where they hold similar values.
3. These templates link to external boxes to enumerate letters for UK railway stations - what external boxes are these?

--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:14, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

1. Noted
2. I believe this template (and its usages) often combines city+province fields in |borough= with a comma (eg see example in doc). See current testcase for the quick implementation of that currently.
3. Bottom of the infobox, the A-Z row with links to UK railway stations

ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:34, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Just a comment, but I see "Operated by" in the new infobox, and that's a bit of an iffy word in UK railways as the train operator is not always the company which manages the station. -mattbuck (Talk) 10:09, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's a separate parameter, train_operators, that reflects that distinction. Mackensen (talk) 12:16, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

My point is that saying Network Rail "operate" a station is problematic. -mattbuck (Talk) 15:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Let me just say that I'm not all that satisfied with how passengers are presently implemented (see above discussion); if a wholesale refactoring is necessary to properly integrate the GB passenger data then I'm all for it. Mackensen (talk) 13:07, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A locale is not necessarily a city, it might be a hamlet, village or town; it might be a named part of a town or city. It should be wikilinked, but need not be.

A borough is not a province. The correct use of the |borough= parameter is described at both Template:Infobox GB station#Syntax and at Template:Infobox UK disused station#Example.

Concatenating these two - even with a comma - is not helpful. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:29, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Native name" is not an appropriate mapping for "other name", neither English nor Welsh names for a station in Wales are more or less "native" than the other, and using it for the Punjabi name at Southall railway station would be actively misleading. Thryduulf (talk) 10:22, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think 'native' should be considered more loosely than that. I don't think it's inappropriate for a Welsh name of a station. For Southall railway station, yes, if that's not an official name it would probably be misleading. But in terms of visible output it looks pretty much the same, so it's mostly a semantic difference in how the parameter is named. I don't think adding a second |other_name= to show up there is a good idea - it's only going to conflate the two and cause them to be misused, as is often seen with templates. It's also feels a little vague. For Southall, I think the appropriate usage might be to move it into the infobox's "Other names", but a bot can't really tell the difference between conflated official and unofficial other names. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:33, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

More parameters leading to inappropriate use, misuse and added confusion was exactly why many of us argued against this merge. To then use those same arguments as reason why the merged template cannot have the same functionality as the ones it is replacing seems rather disingenuous. Thryduulf (talk) 10:44, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

imv, I don't think it's necessarily more parameters that leads to misuse, I feel it's broadly named parameters that does. The official name of the station, and the unofficial but commonly used name by a local community, should not really be conflated into the same parameter in my view (regardless of languages or if it's just an alternate colloquial name in the same language). There's no loss of functionality indicated w.r.t. |other_name=, display output is pretty much the same. Unless having to instead use the parameter name "native_name" is a loss of functionality, but I personally feel the distinction is helpful? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:55, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We don't specify "the unofficial but commonly used name by a local community". We specify only that name (or those names) that are actually shown on the station's nameboards. In Wales, some stations (e.g. Bangor) have the same name in both English and Welsh, so their nameboards show the name once only; but most stations have two names on the same board: a green one in Welsh, and a black one in English - even if the spelling difference is slight (e.g. Treforest; nameboard). When there are two, which one is official? Answer: both of them are used by the railway, therefore both must be equally official. So we show both in the article - we have absolutely no reason to deny recognition to one of them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:39, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Those are mapped to native_name, which is shown at the same place as {{Infobox GB station}}. So for Treforest, for example, it would look like [1]. Obviously some work to the layout would be beneficial, but it follows the same idea. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:34, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What's our consensus on the two extra parameters? The discussion in the TfD was headed towards implementing PTE somehow, and scrapping gridref? Ideas on implementing PTE nicely? (ping @Mackensen ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:33, 9 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am against the removal of any existing functionality, particularly gridref. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:34, 9 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]