Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects

AllMusic template cleanup problem

AWB is attempting to change {{allmusic}} to {{allMusic}} rather than to {{AllMusic}} (occurred on cleanup attempt on Blank Realm.--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 00:51, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

@Loriendrew: Why is that wrong? {{allMusic}} and {{AllMusic}} are exactly the same template. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:43, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

The template documentation shows capital A, and since {{Allmusic}} → {{AllMusic}} was just looking for consistency. Probably more OCD on my part.--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 22:48, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Whether a capital or small A is used in the doc makes no difference at all to hpw the template operates, because this template (and indeed templates in general) is not exempt from the universal rule that page names are case-insensitive on the first letter. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:45, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Format of rules

Currently, rules are formatted as: {{Redirect}} → '''{{Template}}'''

There is a hidden note in the rules description on the page questioning this and suggesting we reorder the rules as: '''{{Template}}''' ← {{Redirect}}

I'm removing the note as it's more appropriate to discuss here. Should we rearrange the rules? It would make the page easier to read and alphabetise if all the templates were aligned on the left-hand side. Would it be possible to get a bot or script to do this? MClay1 (talk) 08:14, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mclay1: I don't think this is practical, as the page is read and decoded by the AWB software itself (using LoadTemplateRedirects in Templates.cs). A change to the format would have to be coordinated with an update to the software, and both the page format change and the software update would have to be rolled out across all projects that make use of a "Template redirects" page. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:43, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Bots or humans acting like bots should not automatically replace all shortcut template names with expanded ones

First and foremost, these edits are (at least mildly) disruptive, creating needless churn that clutters up watchlists and is annoying to skim over in diffs. Unlike other kinds of bot edits (say those replacing hyphens with en dashes or curly quotation marks with straight ones) there is no visible difference to readers, so this is purely a cosmetic change to the source code based on some editors' personal stylistic markup preferences.

But beyond that, these shortcuts reduce the visual clutter which the templates impose. There is a reason that widely used templates / shortcuts end up with very short names like {{t}}, {{y}}, {{n}}, {{!}}, {{`}}, {{r}}, {{cn}}, {{sfn}}, etc. These are easier to remember the spelling for, easier to write, easier to read after seeing them a few times, and most importantly easier to skim past.

When two templates are merged together or a redirect happens to be a common typo, automatically replacing the name with a standardized variant is still in my opinion somewhat pointless but not really a huge bother. Likewise for templates that are only used sparingly or alone on a line, e.g. at the top of a talk page or beginning of a section or something. I don't think anyone cares too much if {{Mainarticle}} gets replaced with {{main}}, {{Book reference}} gets replaced with {{cite book}} or {{Infobox golf course}} gets replaced with {{Infobox golf facility}}. Replacing {{cn}} with {{Citation needed}} is a good encouragement for other editors to just delete the template altogether (with or without adding a reference), as it becomes a huge eyesore in both the source and the rendered page.

When the "standard" name for a template is a reasonably compact shortcut name, as in {{Mousetext}} -> {{abbr}} it's a bit annoying but also not a huge problem to do these replacements.

Thankfully some of the common useful shortcuts aren't butchered up by this page and whatever bots or bot-mimicking humans use it for reference. For instance it would be hugely disruptive to try to replace {{c.}} with {{circa}} everywhere (while we're here, {{ca}} and {{ca.}} should be replaced with the abbreviation {{c.}}, if they need replacement at all.)

But replacing e.g. every instance of {{slink}} with {{Section link}} is very annoying. It (in this case) doubles the amount of visual clutter for essentially no benefit. These automatic edits are the worst kind of bikeshedding: drive-by bot-like editors coming to cosmetically twiddle the source based on some arbitrary personal preference of whoever happened to write this list without any interest in the substantive content of the articles or any practical benefit to readers.

As a general guideline, I propose that shortcuts officially listed on a template documentation page's list of shortcuts (at top right of the page) should generally not ever appear in the automatic replacement list on this page, and as a general rule, "unofficial" shortcut names for templates that appear commonly in the middle of running prose should be replaced with "official" shortcut names rather than with expanded names. –jacobolus (t) 06:09, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

There are previous discussions from 2010, and from 2016 after the list was blanked. I'll be running AWB with general fixes turned off until this discussion reaches a consensus. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:13, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

Those previous discussions look like a bunch of people were annoyed but their concerns were mostly ignored. Was there some broader community input or consensus? –jacobolus (t) 07:21, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: Not that I'm aware of. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:26, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

I find meaningless names hard to understand and requires a pointless click to go to the template page to see what that template does. WP:TPN (another unclear shortcut name) says Template names are easiest to remember if they follow standard English spelling, spacing, and capitalization. If the watchlist annoys you, then just ignore it. Gonnym (talk) 16:11, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

There is a template, {{WP}} that can make some shortcuts more 'readable' by adding a title= attribute. This template is dependent on the target having a {{Nutshell}} template. Compare:

• [[WP:TPN]] → WP:TPN
• {{WP|TPN}} → WP:TPN

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:30, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

If you are reading the source of a specific page and come across a template shortcut name that seems inordinately obscure whose meaning you can't figure out, feel free to change it manually; if other editors object, you can hash it out on the specific talk page. That's not the problem. The problem is people with automated tools doing mindless edits without any direct intention, based on some list made by someone else, without any wide-scale consensus. Template naming is hard (cf. the joke "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.") but in many cases the use of shortcut name makes the page more legible rather than less, because it results in less visual clutter. The "TPN" guideline should be taken as a general rule for infrequently used templates, but is not ideal for those scattered liberally in running prose. –jacobolus (t) 16:59, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to resurface this discussion again - which I was only recently made aware of due to User:SdkbBot running against pages I am watching and expanding {{bsn}} to {{better source needed}}, and of course the very commonplace {{cn}}. Discussion with the bot's owner lead me here - and frankly I am a bit shocked to see both the project and some of the content of the list. I have read through this discussion as well as the archived ones mentioned earlier and find the entire premise of it for what are extremely common shorthand tags to be almost nonsensical. Many of these abbreviated templates and tags are in very common use and are not at all a detriment to the project. It makes editors who use them more efficient, educates editors those users who do not, reduces overall character count (which in turn has a compounding effect of reducing what I call tag-fat / tag-bloat by up to 70% across the entire WP project), reduces visual wikicode clutter while reviewing & editing and has been shown to reduce error count while editing. While I could see some benefit by changing some of the more obscure or lesser used abbreviations to lean more towards clarity vs. ambiguity - I do not for things that are far more common like citation needed and better source - among the myriad of other common ones.

Quite frankly - I am amazed this initiative exists, and even more amazed (and borderline appalled) that this issue has not yet reached consensus. What's next - killing functional wikicode abbreviations like REF and BR tags to their expanded forms? Let's be serious here - and smart about this. These abbreviations are not displayed/read portions of the articles - so they do not detract from the articles in any way. Efficiency and brevity are good things.

So is consensus - so let's get some.--Picard's Facepalm • ^{Made It So} _Engage! • 16:55, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

If there are templates that should not be replaced automatically, they can be removed from this list. {{ill}} is one such example, which has a long enough full name that it is less useful than the redirect. {{cn}} might also fall into that category. I do not think we should broadly say "we shouldn't be replacing redirects", but instead discussing specific ones. Primefac (talk) 17:11, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I am all for discussing specific ones - but the damage is already done on many of the obvious ones and precisely because "we should be replacing redirects" was broadly applied. Even on the specific ones we would need consensus now, and it is going to burn a LOT of cycles for a lot of people in order to reach said consensus if we are going to do this onsey-twosey. The scrutiny should probably have been done up front if that was the application being used - not working backwards once already applied - and possibly needing to even UNDO some of the resultant changes. I guess I also should ask why doesn't WP:NOTBROKEN apply here (yes - even to templates/tags) ? --Picard's Facepalm • ^{Made It So} _Engage! • 19:12, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't really buy into the "damage has already been done" statement. {{citation needed}} is called 500k times, but {{cn}} accounts for a full 100k of those uses. The more useful a redirect is, the more it will be used. I would say if the use ratio for a template is more than about 10%, it should probably stay as a redirect on articles and not be included on this list. Primefac (talk) 19:33, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

As a former software developer and 20-year editor, I support having English-readable template names for editors' sake, especially new editors. I am for self-explaining code that doesn't require an editor to look something up before understanding what the template is doing. At the same time, I don't think these should be expanded unless the AWB or otherwise editor is also making a reader-viewable improvement. I believe this is the rule of the road anyway. As for "tag bloat", that is a technical non-issue, or at least something regular users of the site are not supposed to be concerned about. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 17:12, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Just noting that for bots, these changes will/should only be enacted when a substantive edit is also made alongside. Personally I do not think users should be making edits that only replace template redirects, as it would still fall under the AWB's cosmetic edit guidelines (i.e. "don't"). Primefac (talk) 17:14, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

You're absolutely right, but isn't that what I said? Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 18:05, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

It is, I think I was attempting to respond to my own comment and didn't realise you had snuck in a comment. Primefac (talk) 18:32, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Ah - but you are not a "regular user" - nor am I. I will say that among code developers you are likely in the minority for preferring verbosity in . Most every other coder I have worked with has preferred short-word subs (sorry - substitutions) and used abbreviated calls to subroutines - again for efficiency's sake and keeping codesets small and lightweight. Or did you actually put every sub inline with the rest of the code? I think we both know the answer - and for the same reasons you didn't, that same logic applies here - both on the front end for the experienced editor, and for the backend. Streamlining that by the order of magnitude it is present on WP is absolutely an issue. We are talking hundreds of thousands of instances. Sure - maybe you need to look up something once - but it isn't so hard to right-click it to a new tab, or even to hover over it and wait for the target preview to pop up. The latter is even a feature that was implemented at WP not that long ago. --Picard's Facepalm • ^{Made It So} _Engage! • 18:50, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Let's not get too bogged down in the philosophical arguments here. Primefac (talk) 18:55, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for that. Was just responding to Stefan's rather philosophical points for justification with applicable points for reconsideration. --Picard's Facepalm • ^{Made It So} _Engage! • 19:24, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Concurred with Stefen. A sizable portion even of more experienced editors doesn't know what something like "bsn" means. Sdkb ^talk 18:21, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I think that is a highly subjective and likely inaccurate statement. And just because you don't know what it means doesn't mean that you should ignore the opportunity to learn it. "cn" is commonplace now and is likely used by far more than it isn't. Do you mean to tell me that you also prefer to type out Wikipedia:Manual of Style and Wikipedia:Conflict of Interest vs. WP:MOS and WP:COI? You didn't know what those were either until the first time you clicked the abbreviated links - or hovered over them. Never reject a free opportunity to learn something fast and easy. --Picard's Facepalm • ^{Made It So} _Engage! • 18:56, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

We are not requiring nor do we want to require anyone type out the whole template name. If they want to type "cn" for expediency, that's quite all right. I even use template abbreviations in some cases. But it also does no harm to expand these to their full name when doing another substantial edit, so that more editors can readily see what they are all about. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 19:30, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. I frequently encounter these abbreviations and can't remember what their purpose is, and have to spend time looking them up. Now imagine what the poor wiki-novice has to go through. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 19:27, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

`transl` → `transliteration`

I do understand there is ambiguity between the words 'transliteration' and 'translation' here, but it seems that ambiguity is largely dispelled by seeing...whether the word is translated or not! Otherwise, that extra iteration can do a lot to visually clutter non-English-text heavy articles, so I don't think it's a very good auto-redirect by default. Remsense聊 21:52, 18 October 2023 (UTC)