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September 22

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Reference search tools talk page templates

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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 2020 October 4. (non-admin closure) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:12, 4 October 2020 (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 province or territory of Canada

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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 no consensus. While the overwhelming precedent set in the past is to delete low-transclusion wrapper templates of {{infobox settlement}}, in this particular case no one can seem to agree. Those in favour of keeping the wrapper make the point that there is an active WikiProject discussing the template, its maintenance, and other items such as which "trivial information" to keep out of the wrapper. Those in favour of merging/substing the wrapper have pointed out errors in the code, inconsistencies with the parameter naming, and potential issues with keeping the wrapper updated when the IB settlement is changed.

In my mind there are enough valid arguments to buck precedent, but with enough valid arguments in favour of merging this cannot be closed as anything except "no consensus." I do feel that the aforementioned WikiProject should look into addressing some of the concerns brought up here (in particular, parameter naming) as a show of good faith and willingness to listen to the concerns of others (ping me if you need a bot run).

Someone has mentioned a moratorium on new nominations, which is reasonable; I think until a larger discussion (maybe at one of the Village Pumps or other CENT-type location) takes place about wrappers, infobox consolidation, and when it is and isn't appropriate, I don't see any change in opinions in the future regarding this particular wrapper. That being said, it would definitely be counter-productive to hold a new discussion on this template within the next year or so (dead horses and whatnot). Primefac (talk) 16:45, 4 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Previous TfDs for this template:

Replace and delete

Province-specific wrapper for {{Infobox settlement}}, with limited transclusions (13), on pretty stable sets of articles, and no other {{Infobox settlement}} wrapper has that few transclusions. Subst:itution will reduce the maintenance overhead, reduce the cognitive burden for editors, and enable articles to benefit more immediately from improvements to the current parent template.

Note: Despite being named "Infobox settlement" the template is not only used for settlements. Per its documentation, Infobox settlement is "used to produce an Infobox for human settlements (cities, towns, villages, communities) as well as other administrative districts, counties, provinces, et cetera—in fact, any subdivision below the level of a country". -- PK2 (talk) 07:21, 24 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Canada place infobox usage: Infobox settlement increased
Infobox usage on articles about places in Canada
  • Note that the OP has changed his nomination rationale without indicating that it's been changed. I continue to disagree with the rationale: it is to be expected that this template has relatively few transclusions given its scope, but it's working for those articles and the editors who work on them, and consensus has been that the set of parameters available are appropriate for these articles. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:00, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
 | Flower              = [[File:Trailing arbutus 2006.jpg|left|30px]]{{Spaces|2}}[[Epigaea repens|Mayflower]]
 | Dog                 = [[File:Tollers.jpg|left|30px]]{{Spaces|2}}[[Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever]]
 | Tree                = [[File:Picea rubens cone.jpg|left|30px]]{{Spaces|2}}[[Picea rubens|Red spruce]]
 | Bird                = [[File:OspreyNASA.jpg|left|30px]]{{Spaces|2}}[[Osprey]]
 | Mineral             = [[File:Stilbite Orange Fans.jpg|30px]]{{Spaces|2}}[[Stilbite]]
 | Gem                 = [[Agate]]
We are trying to avoid edit wars like this. Sure what your doing is best for our readers fir these articles or your preference to add parameters that the project sees as non worthy for inclusion. One of the main reasons we have such a backlash on infoboxes over the past few years is because they are getting so bloated that many now impead the learning process. --Moxy 🍁 02:04, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"We are trying to avoid" - who is "we"? Bug fixing for mineral undone: "(The way the template has worked for over 2 years can't possibly have "too many bugs")" : for me, three bugs are "too many bugs". Would like to see another definition. 77.191.9.108 (talk) 02:20, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Bugs around that template: parameters that are not implemented, e.g. British Columbia:
 |Slogan = [[Beautiful British Columbia]]
 |Flower = [[Pacific dogwood]]
 |Tree = [[Thuja plicata|Western red cedar]]
 |Bird = [[Steller's jay]]
 |Animal = [[Spirit bear]]
... Slogan and Animal were not implemented. 77.191.9.108 (talk) 02:23, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per the previous discussion. The template has only 13 transclusions because that's the number of sub-federal political divisions there are in Canada. If that's the only reason you keep coming up with to remove the customized functionality for the Canadian template, maybe stop nominating it. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 23:49, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. It's not its own infobox, it's a wrapper. The idea of the wrapper is it makes it easier to make changes across all Canadian provinces. --Bsherr (talk) 18:29, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The count is not a factor, there are only 13 provinces and territories. A province is considerably different to a Settlement. Having it as a wrapper is helpful rather than just creating a complete new non-wrapper template. As you say, only used 13 times so why go to the trouble of creating a complete new template when one exists that has some overlap. Canterbury Tail talk 19:59, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep It's an extremely useful infobox for those of us working in Canadian matters. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 04:15, 15 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and replace every instance of {{Infobox settlement}} in articles about Canadian territories with this wrapper to standardise them. --Soumya-8974 talk contribs subpages 05:28, 15 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment - @Soumya-8974: - Do you mean that this infobox template has fields that are useful for other data about a province or territory in related articles? Can you provide an example? I would think that would be accomplished based on the simple Infobox template rather than Infobox settlement. I think the only benefit would be some logo or image sharing if so. Alaney2k (talk) 14:55, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep A province is not a settlement, and obviously there would only be 13 instances as there are only 13 provinces and territories. This is a case of a "solution" looking for a problem. trackratte (talk) 22:13, 15 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: The general consensus in the English Wikipedia seems to be to delete the wrappers that have few transclusions:
Wrappers with less than 200 transclusions are usually deleted
Wrappers with less than 20 transclusions have never been kept
Some items blue in the list, due to redirects
Template Transclusion count
{{Infobox Austrian district}} 88
{{Infobox Bangladesh district}} 63
{{Infobox Belgium settlement}} 31
{{Infobox Bulgarian province}} 30
{{Infobox Canton}} 27
{{Infobox Chaco}} 25
{{Infobox Chilean region}} 16
{{Infobox County Romania}} 19
{{Infobox District PT}} 17
{{Infobox District Slovakia}} 80
{{Infobox Egyptian Governorate}} 29
{{Infobox England region}} 11
{{Infobox Finnish former municipality}} 82
{{Infobox French region}} 32
{{Infobox fylke}} 20
{{Infobox Fylkeskommune}} 19
{{Infobox German Regierungsbezirk}} 33
{{Infobox German state}} 23
{{Infobox Greek prefecture}} 13
{{Infobox Helsinki subdivision}} 90
{{Infobox Hungarian settlement}} 306
{{Infobox Kelurahan}} 1
{{Infobox Kenya county}} 3
{{Infobox Korean settlement}} 448
{{Infobox Latvian district}} 28
{{Infobox Latvian municipalities}} 114
{{Infobox London Borough}} 34
{{Infobox Luxembourg commune}} 119
{{Infobox Luxembourg former commune}} 20
{{Infobox Maldives}} 234
{{Infobox Maldives atoll}} 30
{{Infobox Neighborhood Portland OR}} 95
{{Infobox Nepal district}} 75
{{Infobox Omaha Neighborhood}} 1
{{Infobox Palestine municipality}} 434
{{Infobox Partido Argentina}} 214
{{Infobox Peru region}} 26
{{Infobox Philippine region}} 18
{{Infobox Prefecture Japan}} 55
{{Infobox Province of China (PRC)}} 29
{{Infobox Province Peru}} 191
{{Infobox Province Spain}} 38
{{Infobox Province TR}} 81
{{Infobox region of Italy}} 21
{{Infobox Russian city district}} 1
{{Infobox Russian governorate}} 40
{{Infobox Scotland council area}} 35
{{Infobox Scotland county}} 23
{{Infobox Singapore neighbourhood}} 119
{{Infobox South African municipality}} 296
{{Infobox South African town}} 2,114
{{Infobox St. Louis neighborhood}} 79
{{Infobox Town AT}} 2,411
{{Infobox townlands}} 87
{{Infobox UAE community}} 83
{{Infobox Ukrainian oblast}} 26
{{Infobox Ukrainian raion}} 400
{{Infobox Uruguayan Department}} 19
{{Infobox Venezuelan municipality}} 216
{{Infobox Venezuelan state}} 23
{{Infobox Vienna District}} 27

Here are some of the following test cases:

Old versus new (for regular people)
Old New
Templates for discussion/Log/2020 September 22
[[File:{{{image_map}}}|300px|Canadian Provinces and Territories]]
CountryCanada
ConfederationJuly 20, 1871 (7th)
Government
 • TypeConstitutional monarchy
 • Lieutenant GovernorJanet Austin
 • PremierJohn Horgan
LegislatureLegislative Assembly of British Columbia
Federal representationParliament of Canada
House seats42 of 338 (12.4%)
Senate seats6 of 105 (5.7%)
GDP
 • Rank4th
 • Total (2015)CA$$249.981 billion[1]
 • Per capitaCA$53,267 (8th)
HDI
 • HDI (2018)0.930[2] — Very high (2nd)
Time zones
most of provinceUTC-08:00 (Pacific)
 • Summer (DST)UTC-07:00 (Pacific DST)
far easternUTC-07:00 (Mountain)
 • Summer (DST)UTC-06:00 (Mountain DST)
Canadian postal abbr.
BC
Postal code prefix
V
Rankings include all provinces and territories
British Columbia
Colombie-Britannique (French)[3][4]
Province
Flag of British Columbia Colombie-Britannique (French)[3][4]
Flag
Coat of arms of British Columbia Colombie-Britannique (French)[3][4]
Coat of arms
Motto(s): 
Latin: Splendor sine occasu
(English: Splendour without diminishment)
Map of Canada with British Columbia highlighted
Map of Canada with British Columbia highlighted
Coordinates: 54°00′00″N 125°00′00″W / 54.00000°N 125.00000°W / 54.00000; -125.00000
CountryCanada
ConfederationJuly 20, 1871 (7th)
CapitalVictoria
Largest cityVancouver
Largest metroMetro Vancouver
Government
 • TypeConstitutional monarchy
 • Lieutenant GovernorJanet Austin
 • PremierJohn Horgan (NDP)
LegislatureLegislative Assembly of British Columbia
Federal representationParliament of Canada
House seats42 of 338 (12.4%)
Senate seats6 of 105 (5.7%)
Area
 • Total
944,735 km2 (364,764 sq mi)
 • Land925,186 km2 (357,216 sq mi)
 • Water19,548.9 km2 (7,547.9 sq mi)  2.1%
 • Rank5th
Population
 (2016)[5]
 • Total
4,648,055
 • Estimate 
(2020 Q2)[6]
5,120,184
 • Rank3rd
  • Rank7th
DemonymBritish Columbian[8]
Language(s)
 • Official language(s)English (de facto)[9]
Time zones
most of provinceUTC-08:00 (Pacific)
 • Summer (DST)UTC-07:00 (Pacific DST)
far easternUTC-07:00 (Mountain)
 • Summer (DST)UTC-06:00 (Mountain DST)
Postal abbr.
BC
Postal code prefixV
ISO 3166 codeCA-BC
GDP 
Rank4th
Total (2015)CA$$249.981 billion[1]
Per capitaCA$53,267 (8th)
HDI 
HDI (2018)0.930[10] — Very high (2nd)
Websitewww2.gov.bc.ca
Symbols
BirdSteller's jay
FlowerPacific dogwood
TreeWestern red cedar

References

  1. ^ a b Statistics Canada. Gross domestic product, expenditure-based, by province and territory (2015); November 9, 2016.
  2. ^ "Sub-national HDI - Subnational HDI - Global Data Lab". globaldatalab.org. Retrieved 2020-06-18.
  3. ^ Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. "Place names - British Columbia / Colombie-Britannique". www4.rncan.gc.ca. Retrieved 2020-04-16.
  4. ^ "BC Geographical Names". apps.gov.bc.ca. Retrieved 2020-04-16.
  5. ^ "Population and dwelling counts, for Canada, provinces and territories, 2016 and 2011censuses". Statistics Canada. February 8, 2017. Retrieved February 8, 2012.
  6. ^ "Population by year of Canada of Canada and territories". Statistics Canada. June 14, 2018. Retrieved September 29, 2018.
  7. ^ "Population and dwelling counts, for Canada, provinces and territories, 2011 and 2006 censuses". Statistics Canada. February 8, 2012. Retrieved February 8, 2012.
  8. ^ According to the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (ISBN 0-19-541619-8; p. 335), BCer(s) is an informal demonym that is sometimes used for residents of BC
  9. ^ "The legal context of Canada's official languages". University of Ottawa. Archived from the original on 10 October 2017. Retrieved 7 March 2019.
  10. ^ "Sub-national HDI - Subnational HDI - Global Data Lab". globaldatalab.org. Retrieved 2020-06-18.

-- PK2 (talk) 13:19, 18 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure why the box got 10 feet longer causing mass sandwiching in our articles and now implements sidescroll in mobile view. Can this be fixed? --Moxy 🍁 14:07, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Substitute and delete. The articles contain dozens of parameters in that infobox which the infobox does not support. The sorting of the parameters is terrible, and some user without any reason restores "ordering" [4] which at least is no ordering by display at all. The alignment of the "=" was terrible too, I fixed at least that deficiency. Some functionality existed in the template that I removed after seeing it can be done by {{Infobox settlement}}, there might be more. It seems the template and the related articles are not well maintained. Bizarr are the texts promoting "Keep.": 1) "It's not its own infobox, it's a wrapper." 2) "The count is not a factor, there are only 13 provinces and territories." 3) "It's an extremely useful infobox for those of us working in Canadian matters." 4) "A province is not a territory, and obviously there would only be 13 instances as there are only 13 provinces and territories." (three days later changed to "A province is not a settlement") - either the claims state something everybody knows ("13", "province is not XYZ"), or something illogical "The count is not a factor" (what would the template help if only used on 1 page?) or don't provide evidence ("extremely useful") especially in light of only being used on 13 articles and the bad state the boxes inside the articles and the box code itself have/had. TerraCyprus (talk) 03:52, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • You/IP have raised a number of issues you believe to be bugs, and made a significant number of undiscussed changes to the template while this TfD was ongoing - some of which are fine, others which are disputed. But deletion is not cleanup. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:24, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Substitute and delete. The issues identified by TerraCyprus and the IP above are issues which tend to happen with wrappers, especially with low usage wrappers. The en.wiki infobox system was not built to support Inheritance (object-oriented programming) and while the wrapper system seems to support that, it really doesn't. It requires active editors to modify wrapper template to allow them to support new features of the main template. That requires editor time spent on looking up what wrappers are, modifying that code and, as can be seen by TerraCyprus's comment above, even then you might get reverted for no reason. Seeing as how this is a very low usage template with no foreseeable way of adding even one new transclusion, there is no issue with converting the current usages to use the non-wrapper directly. I'll also note that I'm a bit concerned by some of the comments of our Candian editors which use sentences such as Why won't people leave us to do what is best for our articles. Please see WP:OWN. --Gonnym (talk) 08:38, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes please read all of WP:OWN including WP:SHEPHERD. What many need to understand is there is a huge portion of content editors that feel that mergers of this nature lead to a huge amount of parameters causin bloated boxes...and is why we have a new generation of editors that dislike the box's. Bigger is not allways better. --Moxy 🍁 13:46, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If you have concern over specific parameters, the correct way to address it is to gain consensus to remove them from the infobox (which then might be beneficial to many more articles and create a consistent style for our readers), not have a fork or wrapper and then claim ownership of "your" articles and for people to "leave you alone". --Gonnym (talk) 16:11, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
All backwards....What we have is a template build out of a decade's worth of talks. To imply that those involved with building this consensus over a decade now need to conform to I'll advised parameters for the sake of coding uniformity is forgetting that the reader is our purpose here. Main problems with arguments being made here is about who maintains the articles not about what is best for the readers and these specific articles. Currently the undiscussed changes have left some of the articles with accessibility problem. What we are looking for is relevant data and accessability concerns to outweigh uniformity wishes of editors not interest with the articles themselves.--Moxy 🍁 17:06, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • After thought, and on balance, Delete. Nothing exceptional done by this template, just a basic wrapper around IS. Two solely technical issues, however: (A) it uses non-standard parameters, e.g. a number of parameters are TitleCase. This violates the MOS:INFOBOXES guideline, it's also not helpful to editors to have to remember multiple sets of parameters, especially remembering a different set of params for a settlement via a wrapper (or having to look them up). It should be easy for editors of different IS templates to get stuck into this template without reading any extra docs. (B) it doesn't provide access to multiple IS parameters, and will continue to constantly fall out of date as more parameters are added or changed. It also makes maintenance more difficult.
    On a non-technical note, it propagates a bit of a "not-invented-here attitude" towards templates. This attitude mostly only remains on old legacy templates these days - if a new WikiProject or country tried to create eg {{Infobox Indian state}} (as a wrapper around IS), it would almost certainly get nominated for deletion and, with little opposition, be deleted. The leftovers are the thorns in this sense. This particular leftover is, at least, not visually problematic, hence I didn't care much to nominate it myself, but now that it has been nominated I don't see any reason that justifies keeping it. On a technical note of implementation, it should not be blindly substituted, as was done with the Australian template - that results in empty parameter fields. Please get one of the TfD bot operators to implement it properly. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:25, 19 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, PK2 (talk) 12:46, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep (edited) Since the only reason given is to reduce templates, I would say no. It is not broken. The above example shows that it mangles the display of the infobox. I think that is an unacceptable compromise. If parameters could be added to Infobox settlement to make an identical/acceptable presentation, then I would say, ok, merge. Alaney2k (talk) 15:35, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Alaney2k, it is broken every time a new parameter is added. And it is unmaintained - bugs bugs bugs, I fixed several. Regarding display, this is already a wrapper of {{Infobox settlement}}, there is no single change in display in the articles involved. Any such claim that display would change is wrong. TerraCyprus (talk) 17:10, 22 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, and moratorium on further mergers with this template. Infobox settlement aims to cover all forms of human grouping. As such it takes functional templates and forces them into a super template that I imagine is both hard to maintain, and also hard to keep all the merged wrappers going. This results in a lot of discussion and effort for no benefit to readers or the encyclopedia. I do not agree with INFOCOL in this instance --Tom (LT) (talk) 01:33, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Template is not broken and does what was designed for. No benefit in merging with {{infobox settlement}}. Walter Görlitz (talk) 04:42, 23 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per Bsherr above ([5]). Mathew5000 (talk) 23:01, 1 October 2020 (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).
Retrieved from "https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2020_September_22&oldid=1251690216"