Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects

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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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

@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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]