Template talk:Official website/Archive 1

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I don't like labeling an ext link as "Official website" even though the article may be the subject of the website. To me it seems to suggest we would use an "unofficial website" - which of course may happen on occasion. Also, saying "website" is redundant because any external links are always websites. I prefer to use the official name of the website, which would also be the name of the article, as the link description. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 09:10, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay...If you don't like using it, feel free to discuss on individual article pages where its used for removing it, but otherwise I'm not sure what you want to accomplish by nothing that you don't like this template here? And yes, the EL sections often do have unofficial links, particularly in media articles, so this one clearly notes the actual official one and keeps the wording consistent. --

talk · contribs

) 13:56, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Alan that this template leaves room for improvement, I hope we can make it better instead of not using it. Specifically I'd like to know how can this template be fixed to allow a title? Generic link text is bad and doesn't provide useful context information. Notice how the imdb template links can have a title set so they point to "Person at IMDB", it would be better if this template worked similarly "Named person official site". With an extra parameter for the title and a better default formatting perhaps we could have something Alan and I would both be much happier with. There has to be better more constructive answer than if you don't like it don't use it, wikipedia would never have gotten better with that attitude. -- Horkana (talk) 13:18, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't like it either. Let's say we have an article on subject XYZXYZ, whose own website is xyz.com. A good reason not just to link to [http://www.xyz.com xyz.com] is that the meaning might not be clear. However, I don't see how [http://www.xyz.com Official site] (or templated equivalent) is superior to [http://www.xyz.com XYZXYZ]. In the rare case where XYZYXZ has its own site alongside one or more others produced by third parties that might easily be mistaken for XYZXYZ productions, then the former could be distinguished as [http://www.xyz.com XYZXYZ's site]. "Official" strikes me as a pompous but not very meaningful word, beloved by outfits hawking "memorabilia" and so forth and as a result having somewhat ridiculous retail connotations. -- Hoary (talk) 01:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't see that avoiding the use of the word "official" because it is misused in the real world is sensible. It is definitely in our best interest to highlight when a site is official: in this case we're acting as te control mechanism, and can readily remove the template from places where it is being misused. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:36, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Can you give one or two examples of articles where the use of "official" is more informative or helpful than the alternatives? As it is, here's what seems to me a humdrum example; I don't see how "Official site" is preferable to either "Armatrading's site" or "Joan Armatrading". -- Hoary (talk) 01:50, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

It's not a case of being "more informative or helpful than the alternatives" - it's a case of treating them consistently. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:20, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

In many places, consistency is very valuable. For example, I'm delighted that the world is slowly moving toward universal use of Unicode, and that there's little or no argument over whether a certain short string of bytes is for 魑 or 魅 or 魍 or 魎. But pray tell me, how is consistency a virtue here? -- Hoary (talk) 15:42, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Not only does it remove any ambiguity as to the preferred format for such links, it also makes it much easier to automate their tracking, placement and other tasks. I've yet to see a compelling counter-argument for that. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:33, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

"Placement": I think I understand this one. Take a subject such as a certain watch brand ("maker"), and assume for now that it has one site that we can reasonably call "official" if we happen to like that word. For every one of these sites, we have dozens of ho-hum external links, some of which may be close to mere retailers. Some bot could ensure that the "official" site would always be the first in the list: spam if you like, but you'll never be top of the list for more than seconds. Splendid -- at least until the spammers cottoned on to this and added links such as {{Official|http://www.baubles-R-us.com}} (or whatever the syntax allows). Correct me if I misunderstand. ¶ "Tracking", "other tasks"? -- Hoary (talk) 15:42, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Checking which articles have official websites listed, how they're being used et cetera. Extra metadata is always a good thing. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with

Mrwojo (talk

) 15:25, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, in fact it does allow the link to be named: {{official|URL=http://www.google.com/|name=Google}} produces Google. This format also reduces the 1= confusion. —

Mrwojo (talk

) 15:35, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Those parameters should be considered depreciated and are present due to the other template that was merged with this one. Why even use the {{

Official}} template at all if you want to use a specific name for the link? --Tothwolf (talk

) 15:45, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Because I think the link title "Official website" is never ideal, which led me to question the current usefulness of this template. {{

Mrwojo (talk

) 16:18, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. Perhaps redirecting Template:OfficialSite here wasn't the best idea then. --Tothwolf (talk) 16:23, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

If the current wording is "never ideal" then it should be changed, not worked around with new flags or template forks or whatever. Personally I don't really care what the wording is so long as it's consistent; it is consistency, rather than trying to avoid offending everyone's aesthetic sensibilities, that I'm concerned about. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:21, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you on the issue of consistency although I have no idea what the final result should look like. I often wish we had consistency with the external links to related sites and especially with Category:External link templates (which I'm not even going to begin modifying due to the lack of a "look and feel" guideline for such templates and links). --Tothwolf (talk) 13:57, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

We'll get there eventually; ideally I'd prefer for almost all external links to be via a template of some sort. The only way to drive that sort of thing is to deploy early and often until a rough consensus forms, which has worked pretty well for basically all template roll-outs over the years. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:22, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd prefer for almost all external links to be via a template of some sort | Perhaps I'm slow, but how would this be preferable? -- Hoary (talk) 15:44, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, to give you a specific example that I worked with not too long ago, we had tons of regular links to projects on

Freshmeat}} to replace them which means in the future when they change the site structure, fixing all the links will only require one edit vs 100s. --Tothwolf (talk

) 16:17, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. Furthermore, it allows them to be styled in specific manners, tracked and categorised and so on. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:25, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Well done for templatifying Freshmeat. But I don't see how that is relevant to this. -- Hoary (talk) 15:42, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

This template should provide more context with the link name for the sake of usability. Anything like "Google, official website" or "Official website of Google" is an improvement to me. This template seems like a bit of unnecessary complexity for editors, but better wording would at least be helpful to readers. —

Mrwojo (talk

) 16:02, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how a link titled "Official website" on the Google page is significantly less clear than a link titled "Official Google website" would be. Regardless, should there be consensus to pick that format I'd be happy to follow it. What I don't want is a bunch of options which make things needlessly inconsistent. We should pick the best format and use it consistently. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:25, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Well I don't think it's hugely less clear in simple cases, just that a link outside of running text should provide its own context to some extent. Accessibility/usability testing for websites commonly recommends more context for link names (where the worst-case example is the dreaded "click here").

I merely used Google as a placeholder but it can also illustrate a confusing scenario for this template. The

Google search article. This template isn't used in Google at the moment and I don't think it'd fit because of this ambiguity. Perhaps this template should present itself as an "official flag" for a link, similar to the language icons (e.g., {{fr

}}):

• Google.com (official website)
• Google Corporate (official website)
• Google Blog (official website)

This looks ideal to me and would be more flexible. —

Mrwojo (talk

) 02:15, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

How about this:
[{{{1|{{{URL|}}}}}} {{{2|{{{name|Official website}}}}}}]{{#if:{{{2|}}}{{{name|}}}| <span style="font-size:0.95em; font-weight:bold; color:#555;">(official website)</span>}}
--Tothwolf (talk) 06:10, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Nifty. I'd still rather not embellish these too much, but that seems like a good compromise. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 09:22, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

If you go to use it, make sure to grab the raw text as the parser still stripped out the   in the rendered version. --Tothwolf (talk) 09:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, the first parameter technically should alternate {{{1|{{{url|{{{URL|}}}}}}}}} for consistency with how we usually pass the |url= parameter to templates. --Tothwolf (talk) 09:51, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That seems like a step in the right direction and a change that I'd support. When I was writing my last reply I was imagining something like:

[{{{1|{{{url|{{{URL|{{error|Error: Missing URL.}}}}}}}}}}} {{{2|{{{name|{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}}] <span style="font-size:0.95em; font-weight:bold; color:#555;">(official website)</span>

The main difference is the default to {{PAGENAME}} and "(official site)" always shows. One minor suggestion is to use {{

Mrwojo (talk

) 16:04, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

My concerns with going that route are that this template is used in 1000s of articles and such a change might possibly be seen as controversial. The text style would at least match {{Languageicon}}, which is already used to identify non-English links, but are there any other external link templates that currently use the same style? I'm also wondering how would we handle the non-English "official" links, we could end up with (official website) (language) which may or may not look right. I can see about working up a proper error message for a missing url parameter. --Tothwolf (talk) 18:03, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed how widely it's used, including odd transclusions in some infoboxes. The "(official website) (language)" thing isn't so great, but we could drop the parentheses and/or move that text to the front. I know of no other templates that use the language icon style, nor any other templates quite like this one. —

Mrwojo (talk

) 00:25, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I found an external link template that uses the language icon style: {{

Mrwojo (talk

) 01:27, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I noticed {{Registration required}} is using yet another style. We really have no consistency when it comes to external link templates. --Tothwolf (talk) 03:53, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

That styling is being discussed over at

Subscription

}} will continue looking like that.

I've looked through about 200 of the

Mrwojo (talk

) 00:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

←
Looks like we are all thinking along the same lines then. I've been thinking of creating a metatemplate to deal with just this sort of thing and had just mentioned that at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject External links#Flashy sites. --Tothwolf (talk) 01:23, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I've created a meta-template as {{External link}}. I think it covers everything we've been discussing above. --Tothwolf (talk) 00:29, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Great. I'm a little concerned over what is perhaps a too-broad name (whould we subclass things like {{

youtube}} to it?) but this is a step in the right direction. I'm okay with an editprotected here to subclass this one now if you want. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk

08:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I think we should test it further before having it protected and using it in larger templates such as this one. I could however, work up a wrapper template for Template:OfficialSite which currently redirects here since that would allow us to see what it looks like in actual use. I really don't know if {{

youtube}} would use it, but it will allow us to standardise the look and include some form of standard metadata for those who use screen readers. I know sites that use flash, plugins, or require registration are a major issue for visually impaired readers. --Tothwolf (talk

) 17:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

The more I play with {{External link}} and the more I think about it, I think that template is destined to be used as both an inline and a meta-template. For example: {{External link|http://www.example.com/|Example link|language=fr|official=y}}
{{External link|http://www.example.com/|Example link|language=fr|official=y}}
Thoughts? --Tothwolf (talk) 19:36, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I find myself agreeing with this, but I really think that we need to move this somewhere with higher community participation before engineering it all. One of the Village Pumps? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 23:10, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

You are probably more familiar with the best places to bring up that sort of thing than I am. I've always tended to work more in the background until just recently due to the fact that I'm currently unable to do much of any article editing (for a very specific reason) so I've been focusing on wrapping up some Template: projects I've had on my to-do list for awhile. One thing I should point out with {{External link}} is there was a different template by the same name that was basically unused and deleted previously so if anyone mentions a past TfD, that wasn't the same template. --Tothwolf (talk) 00:31, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Why doesn't {{official|http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/episodes/episodes.php?seas=1&ep=101&act=1}} work? —

If I'm not mistaken, the template has an issue with &/? signs. It won't work for me with any URL that has them either. Not sure how to fix it though. --

talk · contribs

) 18:14, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Use 1= before the URL. --- RockMFR 19:03, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

{{

Please move the documentation to

 Done, thanks. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:29, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Thankee. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 19:35, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't "home page" be a better wording for this? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:24, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

They don't have the same meaning. --- RockMFR 13:11, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Is there any reason why {{

I concur.  Skomorokh  23:27, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

By all means. 「

? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000

18:07, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

What is an "official website"? Sometimes it is obvious, but sometimes not. See the discussion here.Mhockey (talk) 09:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

If it's not clear-cut (or at least obvious), it's a matter of editorial discretion and needs to be addressed at each article individually. It is entirely possible, in fact, for there to be no "satisfactory" official website to correspond with a given article's subject. This template makes no recommendations for usage (beyond, of course, being for "official" websites); its purpose is simply to standardize formatting for such links. 「

? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000

17:27, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

views please? Bridgeplayer (talk) 15:37, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, ex links should lead with an asteriks, except perhaps when there is only one of them in an article.  Skomorokh  16:22, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Can an admin alter the template, now, please? Bridgeplayer (talk) 16:29, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

If you describe fully the changes you want made, and they are uncontroversial or supported by consensus, then yes I can.

barbarian 

16:31, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

As above, I am looking for the output to be:

• Official website

rather than: Official website Bridgeplayer (talk) 17:04, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Why would we want to make this external link template inconsistent with all the others? And who is going to fix the thousands of articles which would have two s were this proposed change to be implemented?

barbarian 

17:15, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

This the problem that I, and many others, find with Wikipedia. I make what I intended to be a constructive suggestion and, instead of a patient, reasoned rejection I get a snarky comment; and from an admin who should know better. Bridgeplayer (talk) 21:15, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

It was not a snarky comment, but two genuine questions aimed at helping you develop a rationale to change something that you will have a hard time changing. Please assume good faith.

barbarian 

21:18, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

This is the problem. I didn't comment on your 'good faith', I commented on your approach. You could have replied "Thank you for you suggestion and I understand what you are aiming to achieve. However, implementation is not practical for a couple of reason. Firstly, this would make this external link template inconsistent with others of the type. In addition, editors in many articles will have already added an asterisk before this template and that would need fixing in a large number of articles. Though this idea cannot be adopted, please do not be discouraged if you have future suggestions." Hopefully you can see the difference in tone; and which is more likely to encourage future contributions. There is some excellent advice at

WP:BITE. Bridgeplayer (talk

) 23:47, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how his comment might be bitey... a bit brusque, to be sure, but this is usually unavoidable - if we made sure that every comment we wrote was completely friendly and not the least bit bitey, abrupt, or what-have-you, we'd be spending all our time writing flowery comments that make a five-word point over three sentences, and never have time to do anything else. Frankly, It seems like his comment is actually far friendlier and kinder in tone than you might get elsewhere on the internet; I could easily see a response along the lines of "fsck off, it's too much work and I hate change" from some people I know on other websites. 「

? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000

21:31, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

This can't be done as it will break all the existing transclusions. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:15, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

OK. Bridgeplayer (talk) 17:42, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Though there is variance; 'Official site' seems more common than 'Official website'. Bridgeplayer (talk) 15:39, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Templatophiles, may I nudge you here. -- Hoary (talk) 05:01, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

This template doesn't give a proper display when used with URL http://www.simon.com/mall/?id=196. Here's what it gives:

No URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.

Could someone take a look and see if this can be fixed? Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:17, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

As it says in the template documentation, "Some URLs that contain special characters, such as & or =, will break the template. The solution is to prepend the URL with 1=" (ie. use {{official website|1=http://www.simon.com/mall/?id=196}}) -

talk

) 03:45, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Oops, should have read farther! Thanks for the reply. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:52, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

The edit done by Kaihsu, which gave no edit summary for the change and I can't see anything on this page that would request such change, creates some problems. When pages are disambiguated you get Official website of The Glades (TV series), additional to that, the names of movies/tv shows should be italics per the MOS, this is also impossible to achieve with the current setup of the template. This needs either a second parameter which overwrites the {{PAGENAME}} ({{{2|{{PAGENAME}}}}}) or should be reverted. It would require every TV and movie article to be adjusted. _Xeworlebi ^(talk) 09:39, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

I see Kaihsu has reverted his additions. _Xeworlebi ^(talk) 09:46, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Reverted; sorry. – Kaihsu (talk) 10:16, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for my earlier ill-advised edit. I wonder if the link could be made more informative (following Semantic Web thinking) by including in the link text something about what the official website is for. This would help inference engines to derive the meaning from the text, rather than just from the context. – Kaihsu (talk) 13:34, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

No problem, glad you reverted so quickly. While I found the formulation of the link kinda quirky I have no basic problem with it. It would require a second parameter were the name can be put in to rule out disambiguation info (see for example other TV EL templates like {{

MOS:TITLE for full list). _Xeworlebi ^(talk

) 14:06, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

This template does have a name parameter, I think because

Mrwojo (talk

) 15:29, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes this is possible, but will require some tricks with string manipulation templates. I can have a look at it if you wish, but I have disabled the request for now as it is not specific enough for a quick edit. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:21, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes please! Mhiji (talk) 23:50, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Have a look at Template:Official website/testcases. It will automatically add the http:// if not already included. I'm not sure it's a good idea to add www though because this is not always included in addresses. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:52, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree, definitely not a good idea to prefix "www." unless you actually validate the dns (which we can't) since not all webservers use the "www." dns name. --Tothwolf (talk) 13:04, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Just be aware that these string manipulation templates aren't always the most robust, and can be very expensive. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 07:53, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Template:Str left says it is "inexpensive" so hopefully this won't cause any problems. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

{{

That's great. Can someone implement this then please? Mhiji (talk) 03:37, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

 Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

This template is now broken for https URLs :( check this Official website. Can this be fixed? Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 14:17, 17 November 2010 (UTC) Update, is now fixed. Thanks! Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 03:05, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorry to be a pain but also does not work for ftp:// URLs, for example, Official website. Could someone fix this please? Mhiji (talk) 04:09, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't think an official website can be an FTP server? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:36, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I can see the need for http and https support, but I don't see the point in supporting other

URIs such as ftp, gopher, etc with this template. That said, perhaps we could just test for :// in the url string prefix before prepending http://? --Tothwolf (talk

) 12:52, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Sounds complicated to me. By all means play in the /sandbox to see if it can be made to work. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:33, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

This is an appropriate template but for ftp, https, etc., I think that you should just provide such links in the regular way because there are going to be about a dozen of them altogether.--Lashuto (talk) 01:31, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Bothale Boikanyo is a South-African poetess. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nj.cm.101 (talk • contribs) 09:21, 24 February 2016 (UTC)