Wikipedia:WikiProject Inline Templates

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Welcome to WikiProject Inline Templates. This collaboration is dedicated to improving Wikipedia's inline neutrality- & attribution-cleanup, dispute, and footnote templates. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions and various resources; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians interested in the topic. If you would like to help, please join the project by adding your name to the list of participants. Membership merely signifies your interest in inline templates and members are under no obligation to do anything; however, the to-do list is a good place to actually starting helping out.

Note that "inline" is used here in the sense of "within text" rather than "directly from another server".

Purpose

Description

A project to centralize the creation and management of inline superscript templates such as {{Citation needed}}.

Goals

  • Protect templates from well-meaning reformatting attempts that are known to cause problems in various browsers
  • Develop a "meta-template" from which all of these templates are derived, so that layout problems with them can be fixed in one place
  • Ensure consistency between all of these templates, as to their formatting, naming, content and mouseover (tooltip) messages
  • Provide a talk forum for discussion of problems with the templates, or other needs with regard to them
  • Provide a proposals area for the organized creation of new templates of this sort instead of today's random creation of often redundant inline templates
  • Possibly provide an ITfD mechanism, the way WikiProject Stub sorting has provided the SfD mechanism
  • Actually identify and categorize all of the templates of this sort
  • Ensure that the Template messages documentation is updated with regard to these templates
  • Write a guide to their usage (possibly stand-alone, or possibly as part of the MoS)
  • Improve each template's documentation

Scope

  • Inline superscripted cleanup and dispute templates such as {{Citation needed}} and {{Clarify me}}
  • Reference citation inline templates such as the {{Ref}} and {{Note}} family of templates
  • Recommendations on improvements to Cite.php-style reference citation mechanism (<ref ...>...</ref>, <ref ... />, and <references />)
  • Possible scope expansion into other inline templates such as the {{tl}} family of templates
  • Not formatting-and-function or typing-aid templates that happen to be used inline in article text but are essentially invisible to the user.

See archives of Template talk:Citation needed for some reasons why this project is needed.

Guidelines

  • Discuss ideas for new inline templates here before creating them, to avoid template overlap and Templates for discussion debates later.
  • Discuss changes to inline templates here before making them, to prevent inconsistency, browser incompatibility, and usability/accessibility problems.
  • Inline templates, where possible, should be built on the {{fix}} metatemplate, not coded from scratch, for maintainability.

Open tasks

List of inline templates

If you discover a "new" inline template, no matter how old it is, please add it to the "New inline templates" section below, so that it can be processed (checked for proper categorization, etc.)

= Only part of it is superscripted.
‡‡ = Has a non-superscripted mode as well.
‡‡‡ = Only part of it is inline.

Superscripted:

Meta-templates:

  • {{fix}}‡ — used to create other such templates, consistently

Deprecated (no longer used):

Noteworthy for features:

  • {{vague}} — has feature where optional parameter becomes the mouseover/tooltip message

Needed:

  • {{daymonth}} (for missing day, e.g. "November 2006" when not appropriate), to go along with {{fulldate}} and {{year}} ({{date}} and {{day}} already used for something else)

Related software functions in Cite.php that aren't templates:

  • <ref ...>...</ref>
  • <ref ... />
  • <references />

Non-superscripted:

Similar but out-of-scope (for now?): A number of templates are, technically, used inline, but for purposes very different from those that concern this project (at present).

  • {{tl}}, {{tlx}}, {{cl}}, {{ul}}, etc.
  • {{sort}}, {{nts}}, {{TBA}}, etc.
  • {{day}} and the like; DAB and other hatnote templates; {{seealso}}/{{further}}/{{main}}/{{cat main}} and other self-ref tags; numerous shortcut templates such as {{Shamos 1999}}; numerous other shortcut templates such as {{wc}}, {{cuegloss}}, etc.; language formatting templates; and others that are technically "inline" but don't have anything to do with maintenance or sources, and are not superscripted.
  • {{sectstub}} (recently converted to inline style, but not actually used inline)
  • {{hcard-bday}} – technically inline or part-inline, but do not serve functions similar to the templates this project is concerned about.
  • {{cite}} family of ref. citation formatting templates

Problematic ones

  • {{issue}} – same functionality as {{issue needed|c=y}}, and name is too generic, because {{issue}} is entirely comic-books-specific (according to the doc page however the template itself is completely generic except for the category it adds).
  • {{citation needed}} and {{request_quotation}} – should the latter be merged into the former?
  • {{cref}}, {{cnote}} — possible duplication with {{ref}}
  • {{comic book reference}} — may have a stray period-space in it near end (flagged with HTML comment; needs testing)
  • {{who}}, {{who?}}, {{WW}}, {{weasel-inline}}, {{weasel-name}}, {{views needing attribution}}, and userspaced variant {{User:Xiaphias/who}} may need to be merged; discussion here
  • Cite.php's <references /> — indents for no reason, and worse yet indents to a depth that does not align with the :* indentation used by {{note label}} references. There are a pair of templates, {{refbegin}} and {{refend}}, related to {{reflist}}, which solve this misalignment problem, to an extent (see "Option 3..." at Template:Refbegin documentation for usage), in that they match the <references /> indentation. They are untested with {{note label}}, but work fine with "* Reference details here"-style manually-added general sources in the References section. Recommendation: Have developers modify <references /> to not indent, or at worst to match ":"-level indentation, and modify {{refbegin}} and {{refend}} to conform.

New inline templates

Please feel free to list new inline templates here (newest at the top, please). It is advisable to propose new inline templates at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Inline Templates before creating them, so as to ensure that there is consensus that they are needed and will not unnecessarily overlap in function with others. Once templates have been checked for standard {{Fix}} usage, categorization in Category:Inline templates, and other issues, they should be moved to the main list, above.

Created

Discovered

Deleted

Internal templates for this WikiProject

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  • {{WPILT banner}} – "This template is within the scope of WikiProject Inline Templates ..."

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