![]() | Latter Day Saint movement Template‑class High‑importance | |||||||||
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![]() | Text and/or other creative content from this version of Template talk:Lds was copied or moved into Template talk:LDS with this edit on 17:35, 14 November 2014 (UTC). The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
![]() | This template was considered for deletion on 2020 July 4. The result of the discussion was "keep". |
It would be useful if you didn't have to enter the book twice, manually determining the abbreviation. This could probably be accomplished with a switch statement on the book name. Superm401 - Talk 04:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
It doesn't appear that anyone thought you would need to quote across chapters when setting this up, can it be modified to be able to do that? I needed to quote a block of scripture 1 Nephi 4:38-5:14, but couldn't using this template. Can this be addressed? Twunchy (talk) 20:00, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
Additional discussions about this template, which may be useful in understanding it, exist in the following locations:
Thanks. —Asterisk*Splat→ 18:58, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
These would be links like https://churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/gen/11.26,31 — Damenleeturks (talk) 20:11, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
This template got flagged for potential deletion (or merger with ((Bibleverse))), and while I strongly oppose either of those possibilities I agree that there are potential issues with linking to the LDS church's website, including the potential for link rot and the non-neutral POV of the site (not in a bad way—I'm active LDS—but it is a thing). Then again the LDS website has tons of great resources like cross-references and the ability to easily highlight verses, so I'm not saying the template should necessarily only link to Wikisource either. This post is meant to start some discussion/brainstorming about possible improvements (or, more likely, just a place for me to type out loud to myself).
In an ideal world, I would want the following:
Any other functionality that would be great to see? Just throwing out any idea that sounds cool, and figuring out later if/when/how to implement them can come later.
I'd describe myself as an intermediate-skilled Wikipedia user who has done virtually no work on templates before, so I have no idea how hard those things would be to implement, how resilient to future changes they would be, whether any of these things have been discussed and voted down before, or the most efficient way to implement these changes without breaking anything on pages that already use the template (or only breaking things in ways that can easily and quickly be fixed). But I also feel comfortable enough in my ability to learn the template-specific MediaWiki markup to make at least some of these changes and would be willing to put in the time to help out with them.
Any thoughts on these ideas? Are they feasible? Are they even worth putting effort into, or are most people perfectly happy with links to the official online LDS scriptures?
I'll start looking into what it would take to implement an option for linking to WikiSource and whether any of these changes can be made without affecting the current usage of the template. I don't think this template gets much traffic so I know it's entirely possible I'm completely talking into the wind here (though maybe that big "considered for deletion" notice next to every use of it will get people's attention like it did mine). Happy to hear anyone else's thoughts. biggins (talk) 08:36, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
|LDS=yes
being used to toggle to the LDS version mostly based on the TfD and the NPOV concerns over linking to an denominational page when there are viable alternatives. --Trialpears (talk) 20:07, 23 July 2020 (UTC)I am starting to tinker around with the ((LDS/sandbox)) template and I don't think it should be a big problem to migrate everything to Wikisource. There are a few issues to think through, though, and if anyone is interested in chiming in on them I put them on the sandbox template's talk page. ― biggins (talk) 17:37, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
Per the recent discussion on this template's TfD entry, I propose that we update the template to link to Wikisource by default as it would fit better with Wikipedia's neutrality policy. Since the template is used to cite the text of LDS scriptures, it seems to me to be much preferable to use a Wikipedia sister project that hosts those texts.
I'm sure the (vast?) majority of uses of ((LDS)) are in the context of discussions about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but regardless I think a more neutral source than the CoCJ's website is desirable. And using Wikisource would be even more important when discussing the scriptural interpretations of other denominations in the Latter Day Saint movement, or when identifying criticisms of the CoJCoLDS (I doubt that critics would like to link to a website that is chock-full of resources defending their opponents' positions). In short, I think that the template would be more in line with Wikipedia's values, and of more value to a wider variety of Wikipedians, if it used Wikisource as its default source.
For one point of comparison, Wikipedians have been discussing how best to handle Bible citations for well over a decade—see the Bibleverse template's archived talk page and Wikipedia:Citing sources/Bible—and avoiding/minimizing denominational favoritism is a common thread.
To help see how this might look in practice, I've created a draft replacement template currently stored in ((LDS/sandbox)) that links to the LDS scriptures on Wikisource by default (with an optional "website=lds" parameter for situations where citing to the LDS Church website might be appropriate or necessary). In order to ensure backwards compatibility with the current ((LDS)) template, the new version accepts all the same parameters so it should be seamless to simply update the template's code without breaking anything. (If you're interested in the technical details, most of the actual logic is done in a Lua module, currently stored at Module:Sandbox/Biggins/LDSverseWS, which allows for much cleaner and easier-to-maintain code than doing everything in a template directly; this approach was inspired by ((Bibleverse)).)
If this proposal is accepted, we could simply copy the code from ((LDS/sandbox)) into ((LDS)) and move the module out of the Sandbox area and rename it Module:LDSverse (or similar).
Here's a chart highlighting some of the new template's miscellaneous features and improvements from the current version of the template:
Feature | ((LDS)) | ((LDS/sandbox)) |
---|---|---|
More gracefully handles no parameter case | LDS Standard Works | LDS Standard Works |
Allows linking to an entire book (e.g., Alma) — currently, trying to do this with ((LDS)) generates an irregular link that kicks the user back to the Standard Work that contains the book linked to | The Book of Alma | The Book of Alma (redirects to the Book of Mormon) |
Removes extra space at the end that became part of the link when linking to a book | Alma is a book | Alma is a book |
Allows linking to the LDS Church's website by including a "website=lds" parameter (this actually just calls (a copy of) the current version of the template directly) | Ether 12:4 | Ether 12:4 |
Gracefully ignores all the old parameters that are specific to the LDS Church website (e.g., for highlighting multiple verses) | Alma 12:14,32-35 | Alma 12:14,32-35 |
Allows the text displayed in the link to have a space between nonconsecutive cited verses (without breaking everything) | Alma 12:14, 32-35 | Alma 12:14, 32-35 |
You can also see how the template+module handle a bunch of test cases here.
I'd categorize the ((LDS/sandbox)) template as being in the alpha stage, with the only outstanding issues remaining to implement being:
Other than those issues I'm hopeful that it works pretty much as well as the current version. Please test it out and let me know if you see anything else wrong or have any suggestions for improvements, though!
Also of note, Wikisource has the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon as well as the Book of Commandments from 1833, which could thus relatively easily be added to this revised template in the future if desired to help with scriptural citations in historical contexts. And if we ever wanted to go really crazy and offer options to cite to, say, the JS Papers Project website for the various editions of the Book of Mormon or Book of Commandments/Doctrine and Covenants published during Joseph Smith's lifetime, with their hi-res image scans and top-notch scholarly transcriptions, we would definitely want to implement that in a Lua module like the new version of the template does.
I'm not at all sure the juice would be worth the squeeze on any of those, tbh, but it's worth mentioning that this approach allows for much more flexibility going forward, I think.
What do people think of this proposal? For or against? Questions or concerns?
To be clear, I'm not saying that the ((LDS/sandbox)) version of the template is ready to replace the current version of this template immediately, but I do want to see if we can get consensus to migrate to using Wikisource by default. If so, I can work on polishing the new version of the template (including improving its documentation) so that it is ready to swap in. ― biggins (talk) 09:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Update: The basic functionality of the ((LDS/sandbox)) template is now all working—many thanks to Xover for greatly speeding up the resolution of the Wikisource-specific issues I was having!—so I updated the Module:Sandbox/Biggins/LDSverseWS rating from alpha to beta. Based on my limited-but-hopefully-representative testing, all links should be going to the right places. I will next test out random pages that use the current ((LDS)) template to ensure that using the ((LDS/sandbox)) code would not break any functionality. If anyone else cares to play around with ((LDS/sandbox)) and sees any problems or has any feedback, it would be most welcome! On a logistical note, I don't have any experience with generating consensus to replace a template, but would, say, two weeks from today be a reasonable period to wait to put the new template into "production" if there isn't any opposition (and no significant bugs are found)? ― biggins (talk) 21:26, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
There being no objection, and a few expressions of support, I have completed the migration to Wikisource discussed in the previous sections above. Hopefully the transition has not caused any issues: I created a number of test cases that all pass and I spot-checked a whole bunch of the pages that use this template and so far I haven't seen any problems, but feel free to message/tag/alert me if you see anything that needs fixing or updating or whatever and you can't figure it out yourself. The gist is that there's now a new optional parameter that can be used to link to the CoJCoLDS website (just include "website=lds" anywhere in the template), in which case a snapshot of the previous version of the template will be invoked (Template:LDS/legacy) and otherwise the template will call the LDSverse module which is able to handle all the appropriate logic in a much cleaner and more maintainable format than implementing it all in the template directly.
The last thing that I hope to do is flesh out the documentation page a bit more, but hopefully it explains the basic usage well enough as is. ― biggins (talk) 01:51, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Following recent changes to ((lds)), the following articles are displaying "Lua error in Module:LDSverse". That may be due to broken wikitext in these articles and I'm hoping someone will fix them.
Johnuniq (talk) 07:36, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
((LDS|Alma|alma|7|11))
), so hopefully the issue will get even smaller in the future. ― biggins (talk) 13:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)