Guild Wars Wiki talk:Formatting/Templates

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Contents 1 Reason? 2 Template and Category rework 3 Finishing this formatting guide 4 FOO & BAR

[edit] Reason?

"The reason is because of how MediaWiki handle newlines (dropped if only 1, new paragraph if 2). With template nesting, extra double-spacing might occur where undesired/unexpected." Extra double-spacing might occur? IS that the only reason for preferring the uglier syntax (imho)? Pipe-terminated lines looks messy unless you also request indentation on the parameters. But isn't this easily fixed by removing the extra newline in the nested template or any extra newline between parameters? I'm bringing this up because almost every single article that uses one of the infobox templates does not use them in a "pipe-terminated" manner. And as a sidenote, I think Wikipedia doesn't do that too. -- ab.er.rant 01:32, 10 May 2007 (EDT)

Never mind that last part. I just noticed that Wikipedia isn't too consistent with this particular thing as well. -- ab.er.rant 03:20, 16 May 2007 (EDT)

Just found this and want to make this clear. When using parameter = value syntax, all whitespaces before and after the value are removed. So it does not make a difference between param1 = Name| and | param1 = Name. The only thing where whitespaces are not removed is when using unnamed parameters, for example: {{gr|10|100}} is different to

{{gr
| 10
| 100
}}

And this is different to

{{gr|
10|
100}}

Both multiline examples could not work as the parameters always include newlines (\n). But as said before, the following does work:

{{gr
| 1 = 10
| 2 = 100
}}

I will change the formatting guide and maybe it can be accepted soon. (btw. source) poke | talk 13:55, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template and Category rework

After making this formatting guide more informative, I would like to go through all existing templates and add missing things like descriptions etc. Also I would like to recategorize all templates because in my opinion the existing category looks a bit messy and not always reasoned (example). My proposal for a category tree would be like this:

Category:Templates
|- Infobox templates
|  |-- all infoboxes
|
|- Profession templates
|  |-- Profession icons and colors
|
|- Skill templates
|  |-- everything which belongs to Skill, Skill trainers, Hero skill trainers
|
|- Navigation templates
|  |- Region navigation templates
|  |  |-- Missions, Explorable areas, Outposts in ... (etc.)
|  |
|  |- Armor navigation templates
|  |  |-- All armor navigation templates
|  |
|  |-- Other navigation templates
|
|- NPC templates
|  |- Merchant templates
|  |- Artisan templates
|
|- Maintenance templates
|- User templates
|- Notice templates
|  |- Image templates
|  |  |-- Arenanet image, User image etc.
|  |
| ... (something like this)

(got lazy to the end ^^) - Comments please! :) poke | talk 16:26, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, just keep in mind that the templates are not always exclusive, so I'd say templates like skill trainers and hero skill trainers would also go under NPC templates as a trainer templates or something. Either that or maybe call NPC templates a "NPC service templates"... or just "Services templates"? Hmm... but overall, I think it's fine to just go ahead and restructure it. It probably doesn't need to be documented in detail as guidelines. The current categories were created in a as-needed basis and there wasn't really much thought about it yet. -- ab.er.rant 06:57, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Finishing this formatting guide

Are there any objections? poke | talk 14:04, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't like the rules being attached to template creation. Anyone should feel completely free to create helpful templates without doing the extra work to conform to all of those. If it's okay, I'd like to rewrite those to remove the burden of work. --Rezyk 20:09, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I think it's important that others can clearly see what a templates does and how it is to use. By saying that templates should base on this formatting guide, we can be sure that all templates will be documented well. Of course it is not important to do this exactly as written here and some templates don't need most of the sections, but I think we should encourage template designers to have some kind of description in it. poke | talk 20:14, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I think it looks good, it is much simpler to edit or scavenge another template of the coding is more uniform. Hopefully it won't discourage other users from creating them, but I think to get to the level when you are creating templates a wiki user has reached a certain level of understanding/comprehension about how the wiki works. --Lemming 20:18, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Also as I mentioned above this, I will try to make all existing templates compatible to this formatting guide (which of course will take some time ^^) poke | talk 20:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't mind encouraging stuff like categorization/descriptions, but I don't want to burden creators with them. If someone wants to write a helpful template without doing all that, they should be very much encouraged rather than discouraged. That's much more important than being sure that all templates will be documented well. --Rezyk 20:36, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that adding a short description is that difficult. Also if anyone has difficulties with creating a description I think there are enough helpers available which will do that.. poke | talk 20:44, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok, is this accepted then? poke | talk 14:24, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

I just want to nitpick a little before throwing my support. In order to make it less authoritative (to address concerns raised above), rather than saying "this is a good way to do it", just say "here's an example of how you can do it". And since this is meant as a guidelines, I'd rather see it in a less "policy-style" in that there are more explanations or elaborations on why this should be done and why that should not be done in a more friendly and helpful/educational style rather than the strict and concise "policy-style" wordings :) just nitpicking, feel free to ignore me. -- ab.er.rant 03:18, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I reworded the guide a bit, now it should be less "policy style" ;) Comments please, I want to finish this ^^ poke | talk 08:28, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Tweaks accepted, Ab.er.rant ;) poke | talk 12:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FOO & BAR

Fubar? LeFick 13:56, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Foo & Bar. tldr: Foo & Bar are commonly used exemplar variable names. - HeWhoIsPale 14:03, 4 October 2007 (UTC)