The Signpost

Discussion report

Discussion swarms around Templates for deletion and returning editors of colourful pasts

TfD buzzing

Several prominent templates have made waves this week in appearances at Templates for Discussion, setting the process abuzz with activity. On January 30, {{Persondata}} was put up for discussion by Fram. The template keeps a hidden set of metadata on biographical articles on Wikipedia, and has over 947,000 uses as of press, making it one of the most heavily used templates on Wikipedia and one of the few to have its own WikiProject designated to its use. Fram points out three things: that despite its widespread use its only application so far has been DBpedia (and dubiously at that), that there is little reason that the template should be on the article page as opposed to the talk page (as it displays no content), and that it lacks a gender category. As of writing, there is much discussion of its implementation and implications.

On February 1, TenPoundHammer nominated {{Cleanup}} for deletion, listing six reasons: its use as drive-by-tagging; the rare use of the rationale parameter; the false dichotomy of usefulness for new editors; its vagueness; its similarity to the deprecated {{Expand}}; and the existence of more specific templates for such purposes. Used on more than 27,000 pages, the template is a major part of the cleanup process, and has gone through three previous TfDs, one by HJ Mitchell and two by TenPoundHammer; as of press, 39 editors have supported keeping it, narrowly outnumbered by 41 in favour of its deletion. Similarly, on the same date Mkativerata nominated {{Lead too short}} for deletion, citing that "this template is an absurd example of wikipedia [sic] annoying its readers...issues with the length of a lead can be raised on an article's talk page, where they can be discussed by editors without annoying our readers." The template is used more than 4,600 times, and at the time of writing the verdict stands at 57 "keeps" and just under 25 "deletes".

Requests for comment

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Discussions of interest

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-02-06/Discussion_report