Template talk:2020 United States presidential election

Setup done correctly?

@Pi zero: I am not super-familiar with the syntax for infoboxes, but I expected the one story in the category to show up here once you sighted it. It did not. When you have a moment, please check this. Thanks, --SVTCobra 13:06, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Nevermind. It appears to have been a caching issue. Cheers, --SVTCobra 13:15, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: Yeah, I null-edited the article and the template, and thereafter observed the problem had gone away.

I've been converting our infoboxen, one by one, for several years now to use {{infobox}}, which doesn't categorize articles (there's a recommendation going way back against applying topic categories to articles in templates), provides some layout uniformity, and supports limited customization through simpler secondary templates. Our 2016 POTUS election template uses it; apparently I'd never gotten around to converting our 2012 one (the conversion does require manual categorization of all the transcluding articles before the switch). I have in mind to convert this one in a few minutes from now. --Pi zero (talk) 13:33, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: If you haven't already started converting it, I'd like to take a crack at doing it. It'd be a good way for me to get a grasp of the syntax, etc. Cheers, --SVTCobra 13:38, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: I haven't started. Some unsolicited thoughts. I've been doing the conversions mostly by manually copying existing ones; have of course had in mind to set up a dialog-based semi-automated assistant, but, not happened yet. The standard markup I use for the categories is almost always the same, and only builds the category name into the template markup in one place (up at the top), elsewhere using magic word PAGENAME — but that trick only works if the template has exactly the same name as the category. In this case, thinking forward to the task, I'd planned to start by renaming this template to use the same name as the category (leaving a redirect behind). --Pi zero (talk) 14:02, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

I'll probably start from scratch with the new name and change this to a redirect if I succeed. There's no benefit to having a shared edit history that I can see. Cheers, --SVTCobra 14:08, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I am happy with how Template:2020 United States presidential election turned out. FYI, I didn't look at any other infoboxes, I simply followed the instructions at {{Infobox}}. It was surprisingly easy. I would have never been able to make an infobox in the old style from scratch without using an existing one as a starting point. BTW, I think we should just delete this one. It's never been used and and a redirect would just look confusing in the search box if someone saw two options. The only feature it lacks is adding categories such as Category:United States and Category:Elections to the article if the author forgets (something the old style could do). Cheers, --SVTCobra 16:13, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Another comment, should the changes you made in this edit and this edit be included in the instructions at {{Infobox}} and/or {{Infobox table}}? Cheers, --SVTCobra 16:51, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

I was thinking those would be most naturally handled via preload or form, but I hadn't gotten around to doing either yet. Graceful degradation is also a concern, so lower-tech solutions (like, documenting stuff) are desirable too.

Re the recommendation to topic-categorize directly rather than through infoboxen: I perceive that as a fundamentally logistical concern, that when the topics aren't listed explicitly on the article it immediately gets harder to tell what's going on, and additionally the template-dependence creates a single-point-of-failure where there needn't be one. When I first arrived here, as I recall, there appeared to be a technical concern with indirect topic-categories, to do with how string search worked at the time, which I thought likely to have been part of the reason for the recommendation; how string search works changes over time with the Foundation's whims, but in any case the technical concern seems to me an emphemeral manifestation of the underlying logistical-simplicity principle. --Pi zero (talk) 17:38, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I vaguely remember something like that. Like switching from {{United Kingdom}} to {{Crime and law}} for a particular article would potentially leave the article deficient in geo-cats. Makes sense to not let people get comfortable with the infobox doing the work for them. Cheers, --SVTCobra 17:56, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

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@SVTCobra: I've added a subsection to the documentation of {{infobox}}. --Pi zero (talk) 14:34, 23 August 2019 (UTC)