Wikipedia Help Template‑class

This template is within the scope of the Wikipedia Help Project, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's help documentation for readers and contributors. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. To browse help related resources see the Help Menu or Help Directory. Or ask for help on your talk page and a volunteer will visit you there.Wikipedia HelpWikipedia:Help ProjectTemplate:Wikipedia Help ProjectHelp articles Template This template does not require a rating on the project's quality scale.

This template was considered for deletion on 21 May 2013. The result of the discussion was "keep".

i have bumped into this template a few times. It has lots of long, complicated words and is quite legalistic. I looked it up on the "The Reading Ease" website [1] and it has a reading age of grade 11, for 16-17 year-olds... surely we should be aiming for something a little easier to read. Is there a way to simplifying what's stated here? I ask in discussion because this is used on quite a few pages so a "bold" change may not be so useful. --Tom (LT) (talk) 01:51, 7 November 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It's just been pointed out to me that the template states: "where something is inconsistent with this essay, please defer to those." An infopage is not an essay. It reflects "the community's consensus", not an editors opinion. I propose changing the wording to : "where something is inconsistent with this information page, please defer to those." LK (talk) 03:25, 23 June 2016 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Per the 'silence implies agreement' rule, I'll enact the change in a couple of weeks if there are no other comments. LK (talk) 04:06, 24 June 2016 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wikipedia how to, information, and supplemental pages are types of essays as per the link you provided...see Wikipedia:Essays#Types of essays. As noted on that Essay page "essays serve as interpretations or commentary of perceived community norms for specific topics and situations". Also would not be a good idea to unlink the term essay in the template as it leads to info that describes what essays are, the types of essays and status within the community. Info pages like personal essays may be written and edited by anyone without overall community oversight. For a listing of all that falls under essays cat....see Wikipedia:Template messages/Wikipedia namespace#Essays or Category:Wikipedia essays -- Moxy (talk) 11:36, 24 June 2016 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Then WP:Essays is probably wrong. WP:POLICIES does not say that all the other types of pages are "essays". (It probably intends that they have "the same force as" essays, to the extent that they give advice rather than technical information, but "same statutory force as" is not the same thing as "actually a type of". I've removed the sentence as both needless and misleading. WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:34, 22 August 2016 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I've tried to re-add text explaining what the purpose of info pages are, and their relationship to the parent pages. I think this info is important. Was reverted, but with a vague reference to a discussion I can't find, instead of an actual concern about the text. Since it doesn't look like that discussion ever actually took place, we're going to have it here and now. —swpb^T 14:33, 29 August 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I will search for the talk...but basically we decided not to overwhelm our readers with text of this nature on thousands of pages...on all of these types of templates.....a link works just fine. Also must remember many many info pages have noting to do with policy so the text just added is a bit off. I will find the RfC.--Moxy (talk) 15:01, 29 August 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please do, but if this RfC was about "all these types of templates" (and what scope is that?), then it does not preempt discussion about the best wording for this particular template, in the way you used it. It's clear that you oppose the language I added this template, and on that basis alone there probably won't be a consensus to restore it. But you need to own your position, instead of declaring that you have the support of an unspecified discussion that, it turns out, at best wasn't even specific to this template. That, to me, is editing in bad faith. —swpb^T 15:46, 29 August 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I really dislike this passage for a few reasons. First, mentioning it's not a PAG, that's entirely fine, since an infopage isn't a PAG.

However, the second part I find often quite misleading about the level of consensus or vetting the page has. For example, WP:BOTDICT is an infopage, but having "as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community" is clearly nonsense. That page had significant review, and accurately documents terms of arts and current practices. But also there reason it isn't a policy or guideline has nothing to do with its 'level of vetting', simply because it's not designed to a policy or guideline in the first place.

I find this applies to a great majority of pages marked as infopages, WP:PRIMER, H:DUMMY, etc...

So I propose we change this to the following

This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, but rather intends to provide additional information about the concepts in the page(s) it supplements. It may reflect varying levels of consensus or vetting.

or similar. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:26, 24 February 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Since no one objected, I tweaked the language. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:10, 16 March 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wish I saw this before....we had a long chat at the pump about using the word "vetted". Its was though non-comprehensible to most in a template like this. I suggest we restore the " levels of consensus " term because as we all know most page have 0 vetting.- Plus why link to WP:CONACHIEVE it has no info on this. -Moxy 🍁 18:17, 18 May 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Most infopages have extensive vetting. Most don't have formal RFCs, but they are highly viewed, and are vetted through editing, through discussion, and so on. No objection to expanding slightly to "It may reflect varying levels of vetting and consensus." however. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:37, 18 May 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Will have to disagree with most.....as most are rarely even seen with some being very detrimental. But agree let's add back the link that talks about this point.--Moxy 🍁 20:08, 18 May 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Infopages that are detrimental shouldn't be infopages. Anyway, added the second link. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:17, 18 May 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The ((short description|Wikipedia information page|noreplace)) code should prevent this template overriding an explicitly already-provided shortdesc, but this is not working at Wikipedia:Portal. Anyone know why, and how to fix it?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:37, 13 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

SMcCandlish, it looks to me like the custom description is displaying at that page, so it seems to be working. Maybe you need to refresh/clear the cache? ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 04:39, 13 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

It's is, but the default one generated by the ((Information page)) template is also showing (if you have the CSS turned on to see these things, which are normally hidden from desktop readers). I can tell it's coming from the template because it appears immediately above it, and moves with it when I change the order of the page-top templates. I would think that in the presence of the explicitly defined short desc., that the one in the template would be completely suppressed with |noreplace=. I think it's still being put into the code the browser receives, apparently just with CSS to make it hidden. That's presumably an issue with ((Short description)), ultimately, not ((Information page)). That's not a good way to go about it, if it can be avoided, since we cannot, for WP:REUSE purposes, presume that content that is present but hidden will remain so, because the system doing the reuse has characteristics we cannot firmly predict (e.g. CSS support instead of simply ripping the text out without any of its presentation-related markup).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:33, 13 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Looking at the code of ((Information page)), I see that it is doing ((SHORTDESC:(({1))}|(({2|))))}, which may be incorrect syntax. From Help:Magic words: "Note: The magic words above can also take a parameter, in order to parse values on a page other than the current page. A colon (:) is used to pass the parameter, rather than a pipe (|) that is used in templates, like ((MAGICWORD:value))." Depending on what the code in the server is really doing, this |noreplace being sent to the magic word may really need to have another colon instead of the pipe, or it may do nothing at all, or it may be being misinterpreted as part of the string value passed by (({1))}. Meanwhile, changing the template to suppress ((SHORTDESC)) entirely in the case of (({2))} having content of noreplace is not what we want; it should only have an effect if there is actually another short desc. provided directly in the page. I suppose a module might be usable to do this, to examine the page for presence of ((short description)) or one of its shortcuts, or the ((SHORTDESC)) magic word itself, and then suppress the entire short desc. of the template at hand.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:50, 13 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The noreplace does not suppress the magic word, nor any template calling it. It is merely a directive to the server telling it not to replace any existing value for the magic word that the server has already found when parsing the page from top to bottom. So if you disable the CSS that hides the text produced by the short description template, you will see the text anywhere it is produced, and that includes within infoboxes as well as any explicit uses. That does not mean that the noreplace is not working, and you can check that by looking at 'Page information' (in the left-hand tools menu) and checking the 'Local description' which is where the parser stores the short description it has found for the page. We don't normally care that the template is called more than once on a page because noreplace allows us to select the one we want for the short description, and because readers don't see multiple instances of the text. If you you don't want to see multiple instances, don't disable the CSS that hides it. Because noreplace already works exactly as intended, there is no need to explicitly suppress second uses of the template instead.

The code ((SHORTDESC:(({1))}|(({2|))))} is correct. The magic word is separated from its parameters by a colon, but the second parameter (and any subsequent ones) is separated from the prior parameter by a pipe character. It doesn't need another colon, and that suggestion is wrong.

There are occasions where we need to suppress the template being produced by an infobox, notably where it also adds the page to a category. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Short descriptions #Long SD tracking for an example. For those sort of cases, I wrote a template ((Has short description)) which uses the Module:String2 |findpagetext to test whether the short description template is already explicitly in the wikitext. You can see it implemented in Template:Infobox school/short description/sandbox. I wouldn't recommend using it unless it is needed because of the overhead of loading the whole page into Lua memory just to check for the presence of the SD template. --RexxS (talk) 12:36, 13 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi, looking at Wikipedia:Rollback the shortdesc helper does not display the usual option to import the data from Wikidata and edit it. Also, I noticed that if you choose the "Add" option it no longer imports the data from Wikidata. I made no changes to the page because I wanted others to see this. Has there been changes/updates to the software/features or is this something specific to those types of pages? I normally see options to either import or import and edit from Wikidata, not just "Add", but I haven't done any descriptions lately since I've been working on my long overdue and neglected userpage. Thanks. Huggums537 (talk) 21:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ahh, nevermind. I just clicked on the "?" for more info to find out importing was disabled, but I guess that is a new feature I wasn't aware of. Thanks anyway. I've answered my own question. Huggums537 (talk) 21:07, 14 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I just realized I had a bunch of tabs opened, and none of this got posted to the correct talk page anyway...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Huggums537 (talk) 12:14, 15 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]