User talk:Pi zero

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Good luck! --Panic (talk) 16:20, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] esoteric templates

You mentioned that you have been working on esoteric templates lately. Would you be interesting to helping to improve Help:Advanced templates? I recently scrapped what was there and started fresh. What was there was largely outdated, unmaintained and very hard to follow. I think having multiple eyes working on it could help to make understanding esoteric templates much easier for the average person. --darklama 02:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

For what little my input might be worth (and what little time I actually have to devote to yet another part of wikibooks on any given week), I'm certainly willing to try to be helpful. (My fatuous remark over at template_talk:wikipedia was, inasmuch as it served any useful purpose, a way of saying that I'm currently unlikely to forget to flush the cache when testing a template.)

What is meant to be happening? There seem to be three pages still with content, all with merge tags — and BTW each merge tag unfortunately links to the talk page of that page, so that even the two that are proposed to merge with each other wouldn't have their merges discussed in a single place. To my mind, all the merge tags would ideally link to a single section of a single talk page. I've also been reviewing Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Help:A quick guide to templates, but that too has the familiar feeling of walking into the middle of a complicated conversation... --Pi zero (talk) 12:50, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

For what its worth, I was actually thinking of FlaggedRevs' caching for stable revisions which might of effected the use of a template on some page when I made the remark about revision cache in my edit summary to {{wikipedia}}.

Besides the proposals to delete some help pages and some discussion that has happened on Help talk:Contents there isn't really anything going on discussion-wise that I know of. I think some goals are to improve the help pages to make them current and useful for new users and contributors of Wikibooks, and to use a consistent style for pages along the way. So far this seems to have taken on the form of rewriting completely or large portions of help pages, trying to keep explanations simple, and trying to use diagrams, tables, examples, etc. that are self-explanatory.

I think the merge templates use to link to the same discussion page, I'm not sure what's happened, I guess I'll look into it. --darklama 13:45, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed that on your Conlang pages, your navigation links are not working. Not being familiar with the "esoteric" templates you created, I couldn't say whether it's your list of pages or the template that is the problem. However, I thought I'd point it out. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 17:05, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Adding the category markup to Conlang/Navlist broke the navboxes, and the noincludes I added later didn't fix it because they weren't noinclusive enough. The immediate problem is fixed now; thanks. --Pi zero (talk) 19:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Noincludes around BookCat

I don't think you need them. It should evaluate properly when the template it's put in is transcluded onto a book's page. The additional benefit is that helps categorize any new pages that are created with the book template used in them. Correct me if I've missed an instance where this isn't desirable, though. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 20:53, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Depends on where the template will be used. For example, if a template is used inside a link, extra markup in the expansion will disable the link (which is what happened when category markup was added to Conlang/Navlist). If a template is used on a talk page, there shouldn't be a call to BookCat in the expansion, because BookCat will file the talk page in  Category:Talk:My Book. (If there's a simple way to detect talk spaces, we could modify BookCat to suppress output when called from those.) The dicier the template, the more cautious I'd be inclined to be about it. Some of the techniques being used in False Friends of the Slavist are fairly dicey. I'm downright paranoid about Navlist.

That said, you're right, there should be at least a few of those False Friends of the Slavist templates that don't need the noincludes; the sheer mind-numbing repetition of all those  Template:FFWhatever's has had me just cutting and pasting the same generic markup onto everything. I'll think about which FF templates are safe to de-noinclude. --Pi zero (talk) 22:40, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I've changed the code so that only Wikijunior and the main namespace get the standard BookCat code, with the Template: and Category: namespaces still getting their custom code. No worries about any of the namespaces that aren't specifically defined in {{BookCat}} anymore. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 23:26, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

There's also the  Cookbook:  namespace (I'd forgotten about that myself). I think I'd recommend listing excluded cases rather than listing included ones. To exclude talk spaces, how about this: Wrap the old version of BookCat markup — the one with just three cases, Template Category and #default — in a conditional that compares FULLPAGENAME to TALKPAGENAME, and does nothing if they're the same.

{{#ifeq:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{TALKPAGENAME}}|| ... }}

Another specific exception might be made, I suppose, for  Subject:  space. --Pi zero (talk) 00:48, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't know why it would be used in any of those namespaces, but I suppose it can't hurt. Done -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 01:01, 25 June 2009 (UTC)