Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates/Archive 15

Navboxes have no category parameter, but why? If it could be implemented, could navboxes use {{{nocat}}} so editors can add pages to subcategories? JsfasdF252 (talk) 21:52, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

WP:TEMPLATECAT. --Izno (talk

) 22:31, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, I went through places where the sidebar template linked to and from. If you want me to undo the inappropriate ones, I'll gladly do so. TheEpicGhosty (talk) 21:17, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that's not how they're supposed to be used, have you actually read this editing guideline? This is beyond my area of expertise so I'll leave it to others to comment on the best action to take. Jr8825 • Talk 21:25, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

In any case, I've undone the ones you've mentioned and am looking through the list. TheEpicGhosty (talk) 21:57, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

I'll say that generally we should not be using sidebars except in the most-relevant "major" articles to which the sidebar pertains. As with any nav template, the sidebar should not be on an article that isn't listed in the sidebar, and the sidebar should not list articles that don't have the sidebar or equivalent navigation. Which brings us to the matter not discussed yet in relation to this mass-templating: If the article already has equivalent or better (e.g. more specific) navigation, usually at the bottom, then a sidebar may not be appropriate. For example, if

WP:NPOV failure. And nav sidebars and bottom-bars do not belong in categories. And topical (e.g. "liberalism") sidebars do not belong on articles that are cross-political generalities ("Political views of occupation X"). Nor do they belong on articles on things like ethical failures (e.g. cronyism) that are found across all ideologies. And ....

Given the high failure rate to apply the templates appropriately, combined with the appropriateness failures being of so many different kinds, I would support a mass-revert of this template-addition spree. It is more important to remove confusing and even policy-violating applications of nav templates in any of these articles, than it is to retain a few of them that were maybe appropriate but at the cost of retaining most of the inappropriate ones as well. That is, the cost to the project of a mass-revert and later more careful application of templates where they actually do belong is lower than than of just leaving it all in place and hoping people randomly notice and remove all the inappropriate instances "some day".
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  06:39, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Agree with blanket revert. Sidebars should not be added mindlessly but only when they actually improve the article in question. (t · c) buidhe 05:14, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

I've gone through the list of sidebars I added, and most of them are appropriate. I have reverted all of the sidebars in the examples cited above, and more inappropriate additions. TheEpicGhosty (talk) 13:39, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

You only seem to have removed one more sidebar since the six examples I brought up. Please don't think I scoured through the entire list of your additions methodically, I only I pulled out those six so I could illustrate the scale of the problem. I've taken another glance and can see many other serious mistakes, such as putting the capitalism sidebar on Simple commodity production and Primitive accumulation of capital (a particularly egregious case as the capitalism sidebar has been placed at the top, while there's a pre-existing, far more relevant, communism sidebar further down) – these are Marxist critiques of capitalism. A large number of the articles are specialised subfields or narrow terminology (that may not necessarily be widely accepted within broader political science) and, as SMcCandlish pointed out, adding sidebars to these can appear as bias to readers (another example of this is Permissive society, a mostly critical term). Others are thinkers who are only tangential to the broader political theory/economic model. The guidelines are pretty clear that the bars should only be added to a "small, well-defined groups of articles", Raymond Aron's life is not key to understanding liberalism, neither are Ludwig von Mises's or Jean-Baptiste Say's contributions key components of capitalist theory, as far as I'm aware. Separation of church and state stems from John Locke's Enlightenment empiricism, rather than directly from 'liberalism'. Matthew Arnold appears to be primarily a literary figure, yet you've put a liberalism sidebar there too. I'm a political science student, and I'm not confident about making off-the-cuff assessments of these figures' significance to such broad fields without having a skim through their articles, and even now I can't say with certainty I've made the correct judgement. As an aside, I think the sidebars need to be looked at by a subject expert and the links narrowed down to only include the small group of key thinkers needed who shaped these fields broadly, as this is my understanding of how the sidebars should be used (I'd be able to have a go at this if I spent some time researching, although there may be others more qualified for this than me and I don't have the time at the moment).

Please follow the advice that SMcCandlish and Buidhe have given, and fully revert all of the changes, as I'm afraid I don't trust your judgement here. As Buide pointed out, they should only be added when they clearly improve the article. Jr8825 • Talk 18:50, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, forgot to ping TheEpicGhosty. Jr8825 • Talk 18:51, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, my judgement here has led me to undo about two dozen sidebars, and I'm still going through that list.TheEpicGhosty (talk) 19:10, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

I still think this is the wrong way to go about it. All of the sidebars should be removed to ensure that nothing gets missed, then re-added on a case-by-case basis. Jr8825 • Talk 20:04, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Buidhe: @SMcCandlish: are you able to give TheEpicGhosty some further guidance on sidebars? I can see that EpicGhosty has now made some major changes to the libertarianism sidebar, adding various figures and a list of organisations & political parties, which doesn't seem helpful to me. Also, the original sidebar additions still haven't been mass reverted and with a quick glance I can immediately see problematic ones remaining (take, for example, Muscular liberalism). @EpicGhosty – again, please could you go through your additions and completely undo them. I'm not deliberately targeting you or criticising you for making these changes in the first place, I'm just trying to point out in a friendly way that these edits aren't positive changes and in some cases damaging. Could you find another area to help in other than sidebars, or, if you still want to work on this, at the very least start from scratch and add them much more cautiously (if need be discussing first with editors on the talk page)? Jr8825 • Talk 14:39, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, absent a noticeboard or administrative instruction that a mass-self-revert must be done, it might be more expedient to just go do it with

WP:ANI request (which is not an assumption of guilt but a suggestion for review), to see if the community thinks an admonition, or even a topic-ban from navboxes, is warranted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  03:59, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Not to other Wikipedias (a template could get overrun with other-wiki links by someone determined to do so). The sister-project links could be revisited, the original suggestion to codify it (after the use had become common practice for many years) was to allow two or three (i.e. for a painter, Commons. an author, wikisource and wikiquote, etc.) but someone went ahead and put the RfC up as open-ended, the RfC was closed before new information was added and missed by the closer, and it still makes sense to put into the guideline but limited to two or at most three. Randy Kryn (talk) 17:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

An opinion likely not shared by the group at large, else the RFC would not have been closed as it was. :^) --Izno (talk) 04:07, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

No as per many talks on the matter.--Moxy 🍁 04:17, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

I have to agree with Randy Kryn. Inter-wiki links should not be used in nav boxes unless the other project intends to use the same template and be

WP:BIDIRECTIONAL. In other words, the linked subject is to have the template. It would be difficult if not impossible to include the English language template on another project's page. Walter Görlitz (talk

) 07:48, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Can both navbox and sidebar be placed at the same article? Or, can the two navigation templates be created for the same topic? Because, both Template:Indian martial arts and Template:Indian martial arts sidebar are used in same articles.--157.44.144.187 (talk) 17:51, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

They can. Should they be? Current thinking seems to be trending toward "no, we don't need two kinds of navboxes on a single article". --Izno (talk) 17:56, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

I also think they are redundant. What are you suggesting? One should be deleted? In that case which one should stay? 157.44.144.187 (talk) 18:08, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Some navbox templates rely heavily on linking to categories rather than articles. This seems problematic for two reasons:

1. The links may confuse users expecting to go to an article.
2. In many cases it's basically a reproduction of the category tree UI and is redundant.

What are people's opinions on how to handle this?

A. Do nothing (leave as status quo).

B. Discourage linking to categories in navboxes.

C. Require that category links are displayed as category links ("Category:Cats" vs. "Cats") to avoid confusion.

Kaldari (talk) 23:58, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Does WP:BIDIRECTIONAL apply to sidebars? The paragraph specifically says "navboxes", but the whole section is called "navigation templates", and appears to encompass both navboxes and sidebars. Also, at the bottom, it says "The collection of articles in a sidebar template should be fairly tightly related, and the [sidebar] should meet most or all of the preceding guidelines." Just double checking before I go removing a bunch of sidebars. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:56, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Seems like you're reading it correctly, yes. Walter Görlitz (talk) 06:59, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Junk rule that leads to lots of spam and big reason why they are omitted in apps and mobile view. They are considered as link spam by content writers.--Moxy- 13:01, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § WikiProject links in navigational templates. --Trialpears (talk) 16:02, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

This guideline refers to sidebars as being often found at the top-right corner of articles. That suggests the top-right of the lead section, a space usually reserved for infoboxes (which this guideline does not mention). For about a year,

These criteria are not remotely satisfied for most award navboxes (including all the ones at Meryl Streep). The Meryl Streep article does not refer to Alicia Silverstone, Tom Felton, Mila Kunis, etc. because they, like Meryl, won the MTV Movie & TV Award for Best Villain, and it is inconceivable that an editor would wish to link to those other actors in the "See also" section if not for the award navbox.

This seems very similar to

I'd support that. – Reidgreg (talk) 01:48, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Additional opinions are requested at

I'm slightly surprised the question from DonIago didn't generate any discussion. It also seems strange that this months old discussion wasn't relegated to the archives already.

The use of navigation templates is neither required nor prohibited for any article. I understand that existing statement in the guidelines to mean that there is no requirement to include any Navbox in any article. See also sections are not necessarily required either, so it only seems logical that Navboxes are not necessarily required either. (I brought this up in the previously mentioned discussion, no one argued in favor of keeping the low relevance Navbox in that instance.) Even if some editors continue to take

relevance. -- 109.79.69.204 (talk

) 14:35, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:BIDI as seen at Meryl Streep#External links. Never be able to keep up with the thousands of links spam templates made every day. A more recent problem that has arisen from this is sidebar template spam. What is needed is a rule about spamming these all over.... the current rule tells editors to spam all over if you add a link to a template. Template addition should be bases on a cases by cases bases...not de facto added because a page was added to a template. The problem is so bad the mobile versions of Wikipedia omits them. Why should it be on the shoulders of content editors to have to go thru a deletion process to have these removed from affected articles? The process outlined here is the opposite of most rules.... that generally require validation for addition rather then random linkage by association. Inclusion should be the debate not a deletion process that takes lots of time and effort.Moxy-

Why not go after it on both fronts? WP:AWARDNAV (which is likely to get some pushback) as well as a guideline to aid local case-by-case approaches? Data in infoboxes and use of categories is limited to key information and defining characteristics, but the practice with navboxes and sidebars has been much looser. Meryl Streep is already a large article and the extensive collection of navboxes inflate it further and make it unnecessarily cumbersome. For sidebars, an example of misuse (in my opinion) is Template:Hinduism, which is used in place of an infobox but has over 450 links. I'd move to ban sidebars from the mainspace altogether. – Reidgreg (talk) 06:11, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

I definitely agree that some editors have interpreted

MOS:DONTHIDE? If all Navboxes were shown by default instead of collapsed then the reality of gross over-proliferation would be immediately obvious, and editors might be forced do something about it instead of hiding the problem. -- 109.79.69.204 (talk

) 14:56, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

The template that made me question this is Template:Fishing industry topics, which sprinkles category links throughout its navbox, indistinguishable from article links. Belbury (talk) 07:41, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

In my opinion, this sentence this makes no sense; "The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent"; i.e., referring to articles listed in a navbox. does anyone mind if I remove this? this is in the section "Navigation Templates." . Sm8900 (talk) 21:31, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

we have numerous navboxes, listing many varied articles, for which there is no reason whatsoever why the articles should each refer to each other!! why would that be needed??! take a look simply at navboxes for topics relating a single country, and then feel free to tell me why that rule would make any sense! here's some examples!

• {{Japan topics}},
• {{China topics}},
• {{France topics}}.
• {{Italy topics}}

et cetera!! Sm8900 (talk) 21:39, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

There are many kinds of navboxes, not just those. There's no reason to go through and list every example or exception. The key word is "reasonable". - jc37 00:33, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

This is a perfectly good guideline. If the articles didn't refer to one another to a reasonable extent then you'd have a lot of articles you wouldn't need to navigate between. --woodensuperman 12:12, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Joke] ^[FBDB] lol! ok, anyway, all kidding aside, I do appreciate your willingness to reply. perhaps I should reconsider my views on this. ok, and perhaps I could increase my understanding a bit., how do you feel this should be applied? what is the scope of this guideline,, and the basis? thanks. Sm8900 (talk

) 13:39, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

@Woodensuperman, would welcome any thoughts or comments you might wish to share, on this. thanks! Sm8900 (talk) 16:50, 21 July 2023 (UTC)