Wikipedia talk:Navigation template

Large changes to the essay

Very recent large-scale edits made in this essay seem concerning. Moxy, SMcCandlish, Woodensuperman, maybe you three can go over the edits and see if this was an essay-dump or what. I'm precluded from doing so (i.e. Moxy concerns), yet from an quick initial scan the additions seem to fall on the restrictive end in an attempt to change the way navboxes have been created, arranged, and maintained on Wikipedia. On the bright side, this is just an essay that has the full power of an essay (none). Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:33, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

If the current version is disputed (on actual merits, beyond an "I don't like change" or "I'm not sure I understand" feeling :-) then reverting to the essentially stable version before the major changes could be reasonable. Probably this version. The recent major changer appears to be CommonKnowledgeCreator; maybe they'd like to better explain what they're trying to accomplish. Here's a combined diff of the recent changes. Most of them seem sensible to me, but I have quibbles with a few parts.

This bit seems a little bit muddled: An arbitrary selection of related articles included in a navigation template can unintentionally present a point of view or give the subjects of the articles selected undue weight. It's not clear what "an arbitrary selection" really means here, nor what problem this is trying to solve. If it's not an actual problem, rather than an imagined hypothetically possible issue, then it should not be in a guideline or essay that operates like a guideline. Further, editors (being human) sometimes introducing PoV/weight bias unintentionally is really the subject of WP:BIAS and need not be addressed here probably, at least not at this length. (I would think we'd be more concerned with selective cherrypicking and intentional bias than with arbitrariness and accidental skew, honestly.) This follow-on bit is probably too obtuse: If the subject of the template is a single, coherent subject, the article inclusion criteria should basically be an objective, falsifiable test. This doesn't say anything that an editor without an MS degree is likely to be able to apply on Wikipedia. Next, this is not worded very well to me: Red links ... should not be included where Wikipedia would become something other than an encyclopedia if articles were created from the red links. I would replace that with: Red links ... should not be included when Wikipedia would be serving other than an encyclopedic purpose if articles were created from the red links. But I'm not sure this point is really necessary (per my first objection above – i.e., what actual problem would this solve?) The rest of it all seems fine to me.

All that said, we need to get away from this "essays aren't actionable" idea. They often are; some of our best-accepted principles are found in essays, incuding WP:BRD and WP:AADD (plus WP:ROPE and WP:DUCK and WP:NONAZIS when it come to adminstrative matters). Slapping a guideline or policy tag on a page without community buy-in doesn't magically make it something the community will accept and enforce, either (more likely revert the applied template and category). Any page here has as much "authority" or whatever one wants to call it as it has accrued over time from the community taking it seriously and acting on it. What kind of template is at the top is often not terribly relevant, unless matters have turned in an ANI or ArbCom direction.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your long comment. Per concern of Moxy about previous discussions, I'll stick to just two points, and am not sure how much of those were added to this essay or exist in others (yes, some parts of some essays are viewed of value in some instances, but determinative value does not apply to every word of every essay).

Navbox size. This hasn't been of major concern until lately while discussing navboxes of US. presidents. There should be no upper size limit of well-designed and well written navboxes. For those who disagree and want to split perfectly fine well-designed navboxes (CommonKnowledgeCreator) please start with this one, and do so in a bold move without discussion: {{COVID-19 pandemic}}. Then, when they revert your "I like it" bold edit do not waver, but toss them a dozen or two unlinked mix of essays and guidelines, and then revert them again. What response do you thnk you'd get (and Moxy, with all respect but a bit irritated at recent accusations, hopefully you will take note of the response of Covid-19 navbox editors who deem to revert the good faith undiscussed bold but misguided moves, and they have to revert again, and then report everybody post haste).

Navbox entries' relationship. I've had this pop in every once in awhile, and it should not exist as a guideline or essay topic in any way: an editor questions navbox entries as being unrelated to each other. "Why would anyone want to navigate between Pad Thai and Bette Davis?" someone will ask. That question is always irrelevant if the entries relate to one thing and one thing only: the subject of the navbox. Connections between entries are of no importance, their logical connection to the titled topic is all that matters.

Those are my two common cents. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:08, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Template:COVID-19 pandemic and Meryl Streep#External links we're some of the examples used as in why we don't have navigation templates viewed in mobile view in mainspace (now it's 70% of views). Basically these types of navigations are going to be relegated to administrative namespaces only..... because of mobile view accessibility concerns. If these type of templates were built reasonably and used reasonably it would have changed people's minds. Moxy🍁 00:23, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Hello Moxy. Well, even if navboxes fall to being used on 10& of devices they still exist as one of the most valuable elements of "original" Wikipedia (i.e., Wikipedia's original designs and features built around and for laptop and desktop display). These maps, when done well, are works of literary art, and provide a valuable service to researchers, other readers, and to those wishing to searching Wikipedia's full range of topic coverage. As you may see, the editor that you assured that I can't revert or even challenge is editing this essay again right now, edit after edit, with really no discussion (or its evil twin, way too much discussion to wade through). Just as they have done on dozens of presidential navboxes, which in my opinion made them less navigationable as maps. My concern is that nobody is really checking these edits. Please consider doing so, thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:34, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, Randy Kryn, and Moxy: All I am trying to accomplish with the edits that I made to the WP:NAV explanatory essay is to keep its language and guidance consistent with the current WP:NAVBOX, WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE, WP:N, and WP:NOT content policies and guidelines per WP:POLCON, and provide guidance that explains to editors how to keep navigation templates consistent with all of these policies and guidelines per the Content section of WP:P&G and WP:SUPPLEMENTAL. The content I added was an attempt to make suggestions intended to provide guidance in navbox editing to keep them consistent with all of these policies and guidelines. Perhaps the wording and guidance was not as well-written as it needed to be, but I think that greater guidance is needed for this specifically.

I think the revision proposed by SMcCandlish to the language I added related to WP:N and WP:NOT is fine. The language for WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE is taken from WP:NAVBOX Disadvantage Number 5 and the WP:ATC section "Do we really need this template at all?". Perhaps a link to that WP:ATC section could provide greater clarity as what is meant by "arbitrary selection", and if the intentions of the editor is not what the relevant issue is, then we can simply just remove "unintentional" from the language. We can come up with different language or guidance if "falsifiable" is too "esoteric" per the WP:P&G Content section, but it occurs to me that it is no more esoteric than Necessity and sufficiency as used understood in formal logic and mathematics and used in the first bullet point of the WP:NAV-RELATED section.

I was aware that navigation templates are not included in the mobile app, but I did not know that their size and the number of templates in certain articles impairing accessibility was the reason why rather than some technical reason, and it occurs to me that this is a strong justification for more restrictive guidance in the WP:NAVBOX guideline and the WP:NAV essay. It occurs to me that any navbox that contributes to template clutter, broadly overlaps with other templates, or can be split into smaller templates that otherwise satisfy the criteria for good navigation templates is not well-designed. I certainly agree that the language in Criterion 3 of the WP:NAVBOX guidelines for good navigation templates should be eliminated—and I did propose doing so. It is too subjective to satisfy the requirement of the WP:P&G Content section that policy and guideline language be "unambiguous", and per WP:NOTCREEP, is fairly redundant to the requirement that articles be related in the WP:NAVBOX guideline language before the list of criteria. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 19:03, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, Randy Kryn, and Moxy: Also, as I've note elsewhere, the WP:NAVBOX policy has had language recommending against including articles in navigation templates that are loosely-related and that navigation templates should have more restrictive article inclusion criteria than categories and lists since September 2010. That relatedness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for article inclusion in a navigation template is not a novel proposition on my part, but a longstanding and implicit recommendation has been implicit in the language of the WP:NAVBOX guideline for 14 years now. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 20:32, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Overall, I support the stated goal of normalizing this essay to the requirements of the relevant WP:P&G pages. Our advice to editors should be consistent, whether it's in an essay or not. PS: See WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS: That some other page happens to have something esoteric in it is no excuse for this one to use obfuscatory language (it's an indication, rather, that two pages rather than one need plain-English cleanup edits). Our goal is to communicate clearly, and if we lose most of the people reading it, then that goal has been failed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:02, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't disagree with your reasoning. What alternative guidance and language would you propose that explains to editors how to avoid giving selected articles undue weight by inclusion in a navigation template? -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 17:06, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Maybe start with not adding tangential items to presidential navboxes, such as every bill that crosses their desk if they had anything to do with it or not (and no, arguably signing a bill does not make it the president's "own legacy" unless they had an initial hand in planning and passing it). Starting there would go a long way in fixing what has been broken. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:40, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this is the appropriate talk page for that discussion, and the tone of your comment is decidedly incivil. WP:NAVBOX Disadvantage Number 5 states: "Inclusion of article links or subdivisions in a template may inadvertently push a point of view. It may also incorrectly suggest that one aspect of a topic or a linked example is of more, less, or equal importance to others". The WP:CLNT project page has included language with respect to navigation templates and violations of the WP:NPOV policy since April 2005. The kind of mapping that you describe is not required by the WP:NAVBOX guideline, and as far as I can tell, it never has been per my previous comment about the loosely-related recommendation language being included since September 2010. Which is to say, navigation templates serving as comprehensive maps is your personal view of how navigation templates should be constructed rather than the consensus view of the community. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:08, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Lord have mercy. Now you disagree that navboxes are maps to Wikipedia coverage of a topic? Also, your belief that U.S. president's don't reside in the White House, something I still can't understand per common sense and just basic knowledge of where people live. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:40, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Again, your tone is incivil and your proposal about including the navigation templates of every President and First Lady of the United States in either the White House article or the Executive Residence article is irrelevant to this talk page per WP:TALK#TOPIC. I do not dispute that navigation templates are maps, just maps that are supposed to span more well-defined and narrower ranges of topics than you do. Also, per WP:NOTTEXTBOOK and WP:TECHNICAL, Wikipedia is not an academic or scientific journal or a textbook and should not be written like any of those publications. It is supposed to be an encyclopedia written for the general public, not researchers. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Navbox/sidebar duplication

Yesterday, {{Sappho sidebar}} was created, which has significant overlap with the pre-existing {{Sappho}}. I questioned this on the talkpage and Piccco pointed out that there are already other cases of navboxes and sidebars for the same topic – e.g. {{Socrates}} and {{Socrates navbox}} or {{MrBeast series}} and {{MrBeast}}. Looking further I found this page, which tells us that [navboxes and sidebars] are complementary and either or both may be appropriate in different situations.

Do we have any guidance as to when it is appropriate to have both a navbox and a sidebar? My instinct says that it should be virtually never: it just increases the maintenance burden when something changes for no increased navigational benefit (e.g. if I were to now write a new article on a Sappho poem, I have to remember to update two templates and add both to the article when previously it would only have been one). Clearly these duplications do exist, but I cannot find any previous discussions of when they are appropriate (or indeed an easy way to find examples). Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:37, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems that WP remains vague here, leaving it up to editors' consensus to determine when this is appropriate and when not. For example, the Socrates sidebar does not seem to directly copy the navbox and, given that there are many stand-alone articles reated to Socrates, the existence of both could be warranted. Regarding Sappho's sidebar, my initial thought was to make Sappho's poetry (an area where Caeciliusinhorto has had significant contributions) easily accessible. If editors find it redundant, it could be deleted, or alternatively, as I suggested, it could be simplified to include only the poems. Piccco (talk) 12:49, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

The side-navbox usually contains much less of a selection and is kind of a summary of the full navbox placed at the bottom of the page. The side-box highlights, the footer presents the entire subject-map to Wikipedia's collection. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:10, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Right, that makes sense. Piccco (talk) 13:53, 25 November 2024 (UTC)